Parents soon find out that young children are natural learners. They are like explorers or research scientists busily gathering information and making meaning out of the world. Most of this learning is not the result of teaching, but rather a constant and universal learning activity as natural as breathing. Our brains are programmed to learn unless discouraged. A healthy brain stimulates itself by interacting with what it finds interesting or challenging in the world around it. It learns from any mistakes and operates a self-correcting process.
We parents achieve the amazing feats of helping our children to talk, walk and make sense of the home and the environment in which it is set, by responding to this natural learning process. All this is achieved, with varying degrees of success, by us so-called amateurs - the parent or parents, and other care-givers such as grandparents.
The highly sophisticated activity of parents is described as 'dovetailing' in to the child's behaviour. Parents, frequently the mothers for the largest share of the time, have no pre-determined plan of language teaching, we simply respond to the cues provided and give support to the next stage of learning as the child decides to encounter it. What we discover as parents is that, if supported and encouraged, children will not only begin to make sense of their world, but can also acquire the attitudes and skills necessary for successful learning throughout their lives.
But, this process of natural learning can be hindered or halted by insensitive adult interference. Sadly, the schools available to us, whether state or private, are often based on an impositional model which, sooner or later, causes children to lose confidence in their natural learning and its self-correcting features, and instead, learn to be dependent on others to 'school' their minds. In the process, E. T. Hall wrote in 1977, "Schools have transformed learning from one of the most rewarding of all human activities into a painful, boring, dull, fragmenting, mind-shrinking, soul-shrivelling experience."
A prize-winning New York teacher, John Taylor Gatto, describes this kind of schooling as training children "... to be obedient to a script written by remote strangers ... Education demands you write the script of your own life with the help of people who love or care about you."
The consequence is that parents wanting an effective and morally healthy education for their children based on natural learning principles, are in the same position as people wanting more healthy, vegetarian or vegan diets, or non-smokers wanting clean air in public places, or investors wanting to invest their money in ethical rather than exploitative ways, or people wanting to save the environment from further and possibly terminal destruction.
The system is not in the habit of providing any of these things and often has a vested interest in providing the opposite. So, like the vegetarian pioneers, the non-smoking rights movement and the environmental protection groups, parents wanting education that respects natural learning principles, will have to argue and organise to try to get it.
There are at least three options. One is to find one of the rare examples of humane schools free from domination, (often, but not necessarily, small in size). Ivan Illich describes these as 'convivial' institutions rather than 'coercive' ones. A second is to fight a rearguard action of damage limitation by deliberately providing alternative learning at home in out of school hours, and maintaining a continuous critical dialogue with children about the schooling experience. Since my son chose to go to school rather than have home-based education, this was my own path. He grew to argue that 'school is a wreck, but I can find bits of treasure in it.' A third option is to join the fast-growing minority, (grown from about ten families in England and Wales in 1977 to about 10,000 families at present), who undertake home-based education and increasingly establish co-operative family learning centres to support their endeavours.
From the Roland Meighan column in Natural Parent no. 2 December 1997
2. Dyslexia and the obsession with literacy
A few years ago, I invited trainee teachers to visit home-educating families to see what they might learn from such an experience. One young woman visited a family where all four children, two boys and two girls, were diagnosed by the unit at the University of Aston as dyslexic in varying degrees of severity. The trainee teacher herself had a first-class honours degree from Oxford University.
Yet in her written evaluation of her day spent with the family she wrote that the children made her feel completely uneducated. How could this be? She would be described conventionally as highly educated because she was highly literate. She explained that for every academic skill she possessed, they had three or four practical skills. They could, amongst other things, grow their own food, make their own clothes, cook and bake, keep bees, dismantle and rebuild cars and service them, put a roof on a house, build walls, install central heating systems, milk goats, and keep hens. They could also talk to her about her political studies of pressure groups because they were active in groups such as Friends of the Earth.
The parents had adopted an unusual approach to the dyslexia of the children. It was 'accentuate the positive and ignore the negative'. They had a learning approach that concentrated on activities that children could do with success and left aside reading and writing to develop later. Years later, all are competent, composed and flexible adults whose company is most agreeable. They can turn their hands to a variety of ways of earning money. They can all cope with reading and writing with varying degrees of achievement. One is fluent, and three are competent, despite a warning from the Aston University Unit that one, possibly two, might never learn to read.
The response of the trainee teacher about feeling uneducated raises some important issues. Has literacy, in the form of reading and writing, become an obsession or even a superstition? John Holt, the American writer and teacher, made this observation:"From the fuss we make about reading, one might think that this was a country of readers, that reading was nearly everyone's favourite or near favourite pastime. Who are we kidding? A publisher told me not long ago that outside of 300 or so college bookstores there are less than 100 true bookstores in all the United States."
George Trevelyan observed that "education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading." His point is supported by the finding that the best-selling newspapers are tabloids with a reading age of about 11 years. Surveys have shown that this even holds for a majority of teachers.
The time and effort spent on teaching reading also flies in the face of the facts that it usually takes about 30 hours to learn, provided that it takes place in a learner-friendly environment. This figure comes from Paulo Freire's work with illiterate peasants in South America where he logged the progress of cohort after cohort of reading classes. Those home-schoolers who have also logged progress, report similar results. If it takes longer it can be because inhibitions have been built in by the learning situation. The more time devoted to forcing the pace, the greater the opportunity cost, so that the skills the dyslexic family had gained, that so impressed the trainee teacher, are squeezed out. In any case, illiteracy is a common experience: we are all illiterate when we arrive in foreign countries. Yet we manage to cope, using our intelligence and benefiting from the help and tolerance of the natives.
In the end, however, we come back to the main reason for literacy. The economic motive of 'for the good of the economy', which is constantly stressed by governments, did not impress the survivor of a concentration camp:
"Dear Teacher,
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should
witness:
Gas chambers built by learned engineers,
Children poisoned by educated physicians
Infants killed by trained nurses,
Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.
So I am suspicious of education.
My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmans.
Reading, writing and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human."
Finally, recent technology has come to the aid of many dyslexic people. Voice-driven computers have been shown to be effective in 90% of the cases in the research undertaken by Aptech Ltd who have developed the software in this country. Indeed, the arrival of voice recognition technology is likely to move us gently and inevitably into a new oracy age. This technology breaks the domination of print literacy. Of course, books and other reading material will still be useful and will not disappear, but their domination is gone. Machines can read and write for us. This can be occasionally, or most of the time, or all of the time, just as we choose and according to the situation.
To some extent the decline of the use of print for information and entertainment has already started and has been replaced by TV and radio, for more and more adults and children. The development of advanced telephone technology, including the arrival of mobile telephones, has already had the effect of moving activities away from the print literacy skills into more use of oral skills. An obvious example is the growth of telephone banking. Next, the arrival of book-reading technology for blind people, is equally usable by the sighted with reading difficulties. There are more developments to come, such as the use of virtual reality and the next generation of wallet-size computers.
Thus, the move from an era of the domination of print-based literacy into a new era where oral literacy will be more central, is already under way, even if its significance has not yet been widely recognised. As a case in point, this article was written, (or should it be 'voiced'?) using Dragon Naturally Speaking software supplied by Aptech. I find it to be a kind of magic when you see your voice turned into accurate print, and I am not dyslexic. For those with dyslexia, it must seem like a liberation.
Notes
Aptech Ltd are specialists in voice-based systems and may be contacted by telephone on 01661 860999. They supply Dragon Naturally Speaking software for £170.
The Burntlands Consultancy, Upper Rochford, Tenbury Wells, Worcestershire WR15 8SH specialises in tuition for dyslexics by dyslexics. Telephone 01584 781 341. Operating as a not-for-profit service, their charges are modest, and an initial consultation and demonstration at Upper Rochford, minimum duration one hour, costs £50.
(A shorter version of the above article by Roland Meighan was published in Natural Parent in February 1998.)
3. Parents as researchers
Twenty educationalists including home-schoolers, headteachers, industrialists and researchers, met at the University of Nottingham last Autumn. They spent two days exchanging ideas on the theme of education in the year 2020. One thing everybody agreed on straight away was that the climate of uncertainty, due to continuous change, would not go away. 'Continuous adaptation' was here to stay.
In this situation, parents will have to become active members of the learning society themselves, and become constant researchers. By this, I do not mean writing research papers, but asking questions and sifting evidence and any offered answers. Tolstoy suggested that the only real objective of education was to create the habit of continually asking questions. (Governments are not always disposed to agree, finding passive minds more acceptable.)
There is another reason why parents need to become researchers. A few years ago, a student on a Master Degree in Education course became wearied by the constant procession of research studies presented week after week. He asked me to tell him what, in my opinion, all the studies told us in the end. I asked for time to think about it. Next week I gave a verdict. "What they tell us," I declared, "is that we do not know how to do it. We do not know how to educate children in a complex and changing world. If we knew, we would not have to research it any more. All the research is doing is trying to find useful clues."
This statement still holds. But we do have more and better clues than before. But it means that parents do not have to believe over-confident teachers and educationalists, just as patients do not have to believe over-confident nurses and doctors. We can sift the evidence for ourselves, especially with the aid of magazines like What Doctors Don't Tell You and Natural Parent!
Asking questions may lead to unexpected conclusions and actions. Those reluctant educational heretics, the home-schoolers, decided that they could make decisions based on their experience and the available evidence, that were at odds with 'professional' opinion. They may have even come to the same conclusion as George Bernard Shaw who proposed that "all professions are conspiracies against the laity", well, some of the time anyway, if not most of the time in some cases.
One danger of parents thinking for themselves is that they may be regarded as eccentric. We can take comfort from the words of Bertrand Russell when he said that we should not fear to be eccentric in thought, because every idea that is now taken for granted, was once said to be eccentric. It is not the case, however, that being unorthodox guarantees that you are right. There are many possibilities for error, and plenty of unorthodox ideas are dubious, or prove to be just plain wrong.
Becoming a researcher is a permanent state because in the situation of continuous change, solutions are likely to be temporary expedients. The task might often the to decide the lesser of evils rather than achieve any certain answer. Or the task may be to replace familiar skills with new ones. The computer field illustrates this well. When I wrote a book with my Amstrad 8256, I thought learning all the new skills was well worthwhile. Before long I needed to learn again to work with a PC and Word for Windows. Now I am learning yet again to take on the new skills needed for my voice-driven computer.
One shortcut for parents to become well briefed in educational ideas is to be found in the use of quotations. For example, when Mark Twain said that he "never allowed schooling to interfere with his education", he drew attention to a number of propositions. One is that schooling and education are not the same thing, and can often be entirely opposed. Another is that your own private investigations, conducted in your own time and in your own way, can be valid education. Indeed, one of the reasons why schooling and education can be in opposition is that the questions and concerns of the learner can gradually become replaced by the official questions and concerns imposed by others and, even more oppressive, the officially approved answers.
For a second example, take the quotation from George Bernard Shaw when he says: "What we want to see is the child in pursuit of knowledge, not knowledge in pursuit of the child." This quotation alerts us to a fundamental objection to a national curriculum or any adult imposed curriculum. It turns learning into a 'child-hunt' where knowledge hounds the child rather than a 'knowledge-hunt' where learners are encouraged, supported and advised in their seeking out of knowledge. Because I found quotations to be such a powerful aid to thinking, I compiled a book of quotations on education. People tell me it is useful to stimulate discussion, question assumptions, and expose myths and superstitions.
Another shortcut is the use of analogies. When people say that we should learn and memorise things which may be useful to us in the future, we can try to think of other examples when things are done now in the hope that they may be useful later. The activity of squirrels comes to mind. They collect nuts, bury them and then try to locate them later. Are we being asked to believe that children should collect adult-designated nuts of information, then bury them in their memory, in the hope that they may need to dig them out later? Is this the most effective way to spend time?
For another analogy, Edward Fiske, former New York Times Education Editor, concluded that getting more learning out of our present schooling system was "like trying to get the Pony Express to beat the telegraph by breeding faster ponies." An analogy like this alerts us to the ancient nature of the mass schooling and its growing obsolescence due to slowness to adapt. Perhaps tinkering with the system is like getting the stagecoach to go faster by strapping roller skates on the hooves of the horses, when what is needed is a new kind of transport altogether, such as a railroad.
It helps to locate useful sources of information, but I think it was Winston Churchill who said it is better to read wisely than widely. You could read every newspaper every day, but I doubt if it would be worth the effort, and it is better to choose one that does not insult your intelligence. Natural Parent is one useful source, and ACE Bulletin from the Advisory Centre for Education, set up to advise parents, is another. I think Education Now News and Review is also good, but I must declare a vested interest here.
Finally, the title of 'parents as researchers' is, perhaps, misleading. It
might well read 'families as researchers' since adults and children alike
will need this mentality to cope with our ever-changing world and our own
slow-to-adapt schooling system. In addition, purposive conversation among
family members and others, about these and any other matters, is one of the
most effective methods of learning we know.
(A shorter version of the above article by Roland Meighan was published in Natural Parent in March 1998.)
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4. Educational Superstitions of our time - Shakespeare, Maths and Handwriting
Professor S. Bengu, The Minister of Education for South Africa, gave a keynote speech at a conference on democratic education last May. In it explained his country's intention to move away from a bureaucrat-driven imposed curriculum towards a learner-driven curriculum by 2005.
The enthusiasts for imposing a curriculum on the learners are often horrified at such heresy. "What if the learners do not choose to learn Shakespeare?" I always thought that Bertrand Russell gave the cool answer here, when he said: "Shakespeare did not write with a view to boring school-children; he wrote to with a view to delighting his audiences. If he does not give you delight, you had better ignore him."
I always found comfort in this view, since I admit that, despite many visits to performances at Stratford-on-Avon, I can take or leave the bard. This does not mean I want to stand in the way of those who want to encounter Shakespeare, and for this reason, I find that the work of John and Leela Hort in making the language of his plays intelligible, is well worth both parents and children investigating. With their love of the bard, Leela and John have spent their time and money producing the Inessential Shakespeare series, 'shortened and simplified versions in modern English', a snip at £2-95 each. Five plays have been translated into modern English so far, and the sixth, Hamlet, is in preparation ready.
The enthusiasts for imposing a curriculum on the learners are also worried by Maths. "What if the learners do not choose to learn Mathematics?" Bertrand Russell, who should have a valid opinion since he was one of the world's most renowned mathematicians himself, had this to say on the matter: "In universities, mathematics is taught mainly to men who are going to teach mathematics to men who are going to teach mathematics to ... Sometimes, it is true, there is an escape from this treadmill. Archimedes used mathematics to kill Romans, Galileo to improve the Grand Duke of Tuscany's artillery, modern physicists (grown more ambitious) to exterminate the human race. It is usually on this account that the study of mathematics is commended to the general public as worthy of State support."
Maths is useful, however, if you are doing something like designing bridges, but the idea that we must all go through the Maths experience to identify those who are good at it and need it later for specific tasks, is about as sound as saying we must all study dentistry to enable some expert dentists to emerge. When I was learning Maths at school, then teaching it in school myself, and then watching my son learn it, the same heretical thought kept occurring, that surely there are better things we could all be doing than this.
It is a common error to confuse mathematics with arithmetic, and so perhaps it is the latter that should be imposed? Again, Russell is a dissenter: "Arithmetic ... is overvalued; in British elementary schools and it takes up far more of the time than it should. He goes on to propose that there are much more useful things to learn. Russell admitted that although he was a leading mathematician and philosopher, he was never much good at arithmetic himself.
It is another common error to think industry has 'needs' that can be 'covered'. A colleague who was a Maths tutor, conducted a survey of the 'needs' of hundreds of firms around Birmingham. When I asked him what he had found, he said, "Total confusion." He could not find any common requirements in mathematics, and the common ground as regards arithmetic amounted to knowledge and confidence in the four basic rules. This squares with my own experience because when I left school at 16 and went work in a bank, my 'O' level Maths proved to be pretty useless and I had to learn the number games of the bank on the spot.
One home-educating family, where the father was an engineer, asked me at a conference what to do about Maths. I ran through the arguments. They decided it was a superstition, and to have the courage to ignore it unless it cropped-up in the course of other investigations. Later they said how pleased they were with this policy and how well it had worked out in practice. But then, with CD-ROM interactive discs now available that will teach you 'O' level Maths in a quarter or less of the time of a taught course, you can take the subject on board whenever you wish.
If I believed in compelling people to learn things, which I no longer do since I advocate the learner-driven/catalogue curriculum approach instead, I could make out a much better case for teaching Logic which is usually missing from the curriculum altogether. But it was Paul Goodman, in a book that shocked people in 1962 entitled Compulsory Mis-education, who described mass schooling, including its imposed mathematics, as a mass superstition.
The enthusiasts for imposing a curriculum on the learners are also worried by joined-up handwriting. "What if the learners do not choose to learn joined-up handwriting?" I must admit to being much more worried if they do not develop the skills of joined-up thinking that learning logic encourages, but that is another issue. Perhaps more pain is inflicted on children in the joined-up handwriting pursuit than any other. Yet printers print in script because it is clearer. Natural Parent would be hard work to read if it were presented in handwriting
Nobody shows much enthusiasm for joined-up figures in sums either, and would see anyone as a bit odd for suggesting it. John Holt in his investigations could find no reasons on offer except a claim that joined-up handwriting was speedier. He showed that this usually was a fallacy by conducting a number of classroom experiments and by experimenting on himself. Usually, script was as quick or often quicker, more legible and looked better. Those who chose to learn Italic script produced very attractive results.
In discussion recently, one handwriting enthusiast told me that the body movements used in the teaching of it were essential for the composed development of children. This was her justification for teaching handwriting. If this is so, why not teach the body movements on their own without the clutter?
The enthusiasts for imposing learning on children in school do not have a good track record. There were earlier superstitions. For a time they tried to make all left-handed children become right-handed, with a heavy punishment regime. Drill was imposed as a subject on all children for many years. Children in Welsh-speaking areas of Wales were punished if they did not speak in English in school. Later compulsory Welsh appeared in English-speaking parts of Wales and I have met adults who resented this being enforced on them as children. And so on.
Part of the task of 'parents as researchers' that I advocated in a previous edition of Natural Parent, is to be on the look-out for learning systems based on possible superstitions and get equipped to answer them and deal with them. In later editions I intend to analyse two big superstitions - 'socialisation', and then 'subjects'.
The Inessential Shakespeare Series is available from 239 Bramcote Lane, Wollaton, Nottingham NG8 2QL Telephone 0115 928 3001 for a brochure.
A version of this piece was published in Natural Parent in April 1998, as the Roland Meighan column, entitled 'The three myths'.
5. Where does the bully mentality come from?
The problem with most discussions about bullying is that it is concerned with the immediate 'first aid' problem of how to deal with the latest outbreak of persecution. There are now plenty of books, booklets and articles that try to deal with this, (see Kidscape details that follow), so I intend to look beyond the symptoms to the causes of the disease.
The root causes of bullying are usually overlooked or passed off as some weakness of character. Alice Miller, in books like For Your Own Good, however, proposes that people learn the bully mentality. She concludes from her research that 'every persecutor was once a victim'. She shows how every member of the Third Reich had the same kind of upbringing and education based on unrelieved domination, and she calls this 'the poisonous pedagogy'.
But, I want to come closer to home than Hitler's regime. School in UK, based on the current model of the compulsory day-confinement centre, is itself a bully institution. In a democracy, nobody is supposed to be detained against their will unless they have committed an offence. So, what is the offence that children have committed to justify detention? It would appear to be that their 'offence' is that they are young.
Having confined children by compulsion, apart from those who opt for home-based education, schools employ a bully curriculum - a compulsory National Curriculum or some other imposed programme. We could employ a democratic curriculum if we wanted to, and the catalogue curriculum, which offers a more-or-less unlimited range of learning possibilities and is learner-driven, is just such an approach.
Just how ingrained is the idea of adults imposing their ideas of 'proper' learning is indicated when a school does it differently. Sudbury Valley High School in USA has no timetable and no lessons until the learners request them or set about organising them. It operates a learner-driven curriculum.
The bully curriculum is enforced by the increasingly favoured bully pedagogy of teacher-dominated formal teaching. Alice Miller's view that this is a 'poisonous pedagogy' is supported by others. Rosalind Miles entitled her book The Children We Deserve. Paul Goodman chose the title of Compulsory Mis-education and Chris Shute used the idea of Compulsory Schooling Disease.
In another book, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, John Gatto Taylor, has the following to say: "I began to realise that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behaviour."
He decided to change his style of teaching, to give children space, time and respect and to see what happened. What happened was that the children learnt so much that he was nominated teacher of the year for the New York State several times.
Gatto recognised that what he was really paid to teach was a hidden or unwritten curriculum. He decided it was made up of seven basic ideas. The first was confusion. He was required to teach disconnected facts not meaning, infinite fragmentation not cohesion, and a tool kit of superficial jargon rather than genuine understandings. The second basic idea was class position. Children were to be taught to know their place by being forced into the rigged competition of schooling. A third lesson was that of indifference. He saw he was paid to teach children not to care too much about anything.
The fourth lesson was that of emotional dependency for, by marks and grades, ticks and stars, smiles and frowns, he was required to teach children to surrender their wills to authority. The next idea to be passed on was that of intellectual dependency. They must learn that good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do and believe. The sixth idea follows on from this - the teaching of provisional self-esteem. Self-respect is determined by what others say about you in reports and grades. People learn to be told what they are worth and self-evaluation is ignored. The final, seventh lesson is that you cannot hide. You are watched constantly by teachers, parents and other students and privacy is frowned upon.
Responses to his analysis are predictable, Gatto says, the assertion that there is 'no other way': "It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of my students' parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things."
School, Gatto concludes, is a twelve year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. School 'schools' very well but it hardly educates at all. All this schooling, however, is good preparation for being gullible to the other institutions that control us, e.g. television,
Currently the school system in UK is reinforced by the bully compulsory assessment system and an aggressive school inspectorate. The unwritten, but powerful message of this package, is adults get their way by bullying, There are at least three types of outcome to this model of schooling. The 'successful' pupils grow up to be officially sanctioned bullies in dominant authority positions as assertive politicians, doctors, teachers, civil servants, journalists and the like, and start their own career as persecutors.
Next, a majority of the 'less successful' learn to accept the mentality of the bullied - the submissive and dependent mind-set. Such people need someone to tell them what to think and do, because they have been prevented from learning how to do 'joined-up' thinking.
A third outcome is the production of a group of free-lance bullies who become troublesome and end up in trouble of varying degree of seriousness. Until we replace this domination model with a different model, the root causes of bullying will continue. As Jerry Mintz reports from the USA scene: "American kids like watching violence on TV and in the movies because violence is being done to them, both at school and at home. It builds up a tremendous amount of anger... The problem is not violence on TV. That's a symptom... The real problem is the violence of anti-life, unaffectionate, and punitive homes, and disempowering, deadening compulsory schooling, all presented with an uncomprehending smile."
We can do better than schooling based on domination and I applaud the work of those teachers like John Gatto Taylor who begin to move away from domination towards participation, power-sharing and democratic relationships (see also Trafford below). They organise schools councils that work. They have parental involvement that is genuine. They devise lesson and classrooms based on co-operative principles. They make it possible for children, in the words of my son, "to find bits of treasure in the wreck." But, knowing it is a wreck is crucial to positive survival in it. As one young person said after reading a book of educational quotations, "Now I know that there are other people who think school is crackers, I can cope with it."
* * * * *
Parents faced with problems of bullying at school can find help in: Preventing Bullying: A Parent's Guide by Kidscape. Send large SAE for a free copy from Kidscape, 152 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1W 9TR
This piece was published in Natural Parent in June 1998, as the Roland Meighan column, entitled 'Where the bullying starts'.
6. Learning systems
When I trained as a teacher I was introduced to two basic roles. One was that of crowd-control steward, since a great deal of time is spent dealing with large groups of conscripted learners. Conscripted learners, like conscripted slaves, are not likely to be automatically pleased about their enforced activity, and therefore need marshalling. As Colin Ward once explained, "Much of our expenditure on teachers and plant is wasted by attempting to teach people what they do not want to learn in a situation that they would rather not be involved in".
The other basic role was that of crowd-instructor. This is having a revival as the current officially favoured method of trying to achieve learning using the formal instruction of groups in classes of anything from 30 -50.
The most impressive crowd-instructor I witnessed personally was the head of the school in which I did my first teaching after college. He would take the whole school of 500 to 600 secondary pupils in the hall for two hours at a time for hymn-singing and mental arithmetic, armed only with a pianist and a cane, so that the staff could complete the end of term reports. Standing on the terraces at the West Bromwich Albion ground one Saturday, I was joined unexpectedly by the head, Harold Tyas. At half-time, I expressed my admiration for his performance as a formal teacher with the whole school as his class, and confessed I never saw the day when I could emulate his achievement. His response surprised me. He told me not to be impressed because he had grown to realise that his methods did not lead to any worthwhile education. He said that he appointed young teachers from college in the hope that they would find much better ways than his.
Enthusiasts for the crowd-instructor role ignore the evidence about its inefficiency. The short-term recall of learners after formal instruction averages 10% with a usual range of 0% to 20%. The long term recall averages 5% with a usual range of 0% to 10 %. As a young teacher, I simply refused to believe the evidence and threw myself into a whole host of strategies to prove the figures wrong. The pre and post-test results showed again and again that the research was correct. This set in motion my life-long interest in learning systems.
Three other learning systems get better results. These are not the only ones; there are other approaches that help us match the thirty different learning styles we have found in humans. Some promising new approaches are based on computer technology using interactive video and CD-ROM discs.
The first of the three is purposive conversation between two and up to eight people. This is one of the reasons that home-based education is so remarkably successful, in getting the learners, on average, two years ahead of their schooled counterparts and in some cases, up to ten years ahead. Between 40% and 60% of the time is spent in purposive conversation which replaces the inefficient crowd instruction method. We now know this after over 20 years of research in UK, USA, Canada, Australia and elsewhere.
A second effective learning approach is that of teaching something to someone else. This is one of the reasons why people are so easily fooled by formal teaching methods. Because the teacher remembers up to 90% of the material, it is easy to assume that the learners do too. They do not. When they fail to do so, the disappointed teacher cannot face the idea that it is the method that is poor and is likely to blame the learners for being 'lazy' or 'stupid'. It is, of course, the teacher who could be accused of being both lazy and stupid for not reading the research on learning. The explanation for the much-vaunted Pacific-rim results using formal methods, is in the small print: learners do two hours work with their parents before school and two or more afterwards, to shore up the inefficiency of the crowd instruction method. If they followed the example of home-schoolers and cut out the bit in the middle, they might do even better.
A third successful method is that of learning co-operatives using the discipline and skills of democratic pedagogy. I was startled to find a considerable leap in standards when I first used this approach in teacher education courses. So were the external examiners and inspectors who, never having encountered this approach, knew nothing of its theory or practice. As well being successful in the standard tasks of memorising and reproducing institutionally approved material, the students also developed bonus skills in resourcefulness, flexibility, curiosity, skill in learning, readiness to unlearn, research techniques and enhanced personal confidence.
They found that they annoyed their alienated fellow learners on other PGCE courses, by their enthusiasm and joy in learning. Colleagues were also known to comment sourly when the students from the learning co-operative attended any of their lecture sessions, that they "asked an awful lot of questions".
Home-schoolers exhibit the same extra bonus skills, and one reason is that the families too, operate as learning co-operatives for periods of time. When students from the learning co-operatives visited families educating at home, they immediately found common ground. So when the famous Harrison case was in court in 1981, they supported the family during the hearing and produced a simulation that they could use in classrooms based on it.
The next learning system, which is only a few years away, and indeed could be in place in months if we had a mind to do it, is unlikely to need either of the roles of crowd control steward or crowd instructor very much. We are, therefore, training teachers for an increasingly obsolete system and creating a cohort of new, young museum-pieces.
The obsolete teachers being produced, are, in the final analysis, being trained as indoctrinators. We need to move from working ON children, which is the approach of the indoctrinator, to working WITH children, which is the approach of the educator. It is time to ignore those who have enthusiasm for the domination-riddled approach of the massive and expensive apparatus of National Curriculum, testing systems and aggressive inspection. Instead, we must learn from the astonishing success of the home-schoolers, about how we might construct a more humane, dignified, and cheaper learning system. Along with this will go a different, enhanced and more professional and worthy role for teachers as learning coaches and consultants rather than crowd control stewards and crowd instructors - 'cops without uniforms', as the USA teacher John Holt used to put it.
Roland Meighan
This piece was published in Natural Parent in June 1998, as the Roland Meighan column, entitled 'The cop without a uniform'.
7. What is a good teacher?
People are often shocked to find that there is no agreement about 'good' teaching. One view stresses that a good teacher is in the business of making themselves redundant. The American educator, John Holt, put it like this:
"a good teacher teaches you how to teach yourself better."
So the task of the teacher is to make themselves unnecessary as soon as possible.
Another view stresses the teacher as instructor, taking decisive action by using crowd control skills to organise learners. Then, using crowd instruction methods, the teacher tries to get the learners to memorise a particular piece of information or achieve a required understanding. This tends to be the officially approved view of 'good' teaching, that underpins the whole imposed apparatus of the National Curriculum, the Testing System and the OFSTED inspection ideology.
The third view sees the good teacher as supporting the growth of learning groups who direct and manage their own learning:
"Of a good teacher, they say, when the task is done, we did this ourselves!"
Actually, Lao-tse was talking about the characteristics of good leaders, but I suggest it applies to this particular view of teaching too.
There is a further definition of a good teacher - one who stimulates another person's researches. Most of the 'my best teacher' articles that I have read use you the second model of 'teacher instructing me'. I must confess that I find these kind of articles rather repetitive and tedious. In contrast to this constant admiration for the instructor-teacher, my 'best' teacher hardly spoke to me directly, apart from the usual pleasantries of 'hello', 'good-bye', and 'how are you?'. He was the Co-operative Society Insurance Agent. He made our house his last call on a Saturday, since he knew that he would be certain to get a cup of coffee and a lively discussion with my father. I learned to make it my business to be in the room, reading or working, to listen in on these conversations, because new and exciting ideas were constantly being introduced. Charlie would mention a book, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist by somebody called Robert Tressell. I would go to the library and investigate. Next time, he might mention a radical theologian named Peter Abelard, which meant another trip to the library. On another occasion he would quote a guy called Bertrand Russell, so that meant another search along the bookshelves. A person named Tom Paine apparently wrote an interesting book called The Rights of Man, so that needed checking out. On the subject of ghosts, he talked about the research activity of the ghost-busting British Psychic Research Association. I needed the assistance of the librarian to track this one down.
Charlie was a self-educated man, a evening classes attender I would guess, and had no formal qualifications to my knowledge, but I think he was the best educated person I ever met. He exemplified the character in Wesker's Roots who declared that 'education is asking questions all the time'. Yet he seemed entirely content with his work in the Co-operative Movement. None of the topics he stimulated me to look into, ever seemed to be on the agenda at school, and I had no reason to believe that any of the teachers would even welcome their introduction.
Another version of 'good' teaching is one who waits to be asked. Holt proposed the dictum of 'no question, no teaching'. Unless someone has asked a question, there is no mandate for teaching. One school, Sudbury Valley in USA, takes this seriously, so there is no timetable unless the learners organise or request some systematic learning activity. That this idea alarms or perplexes people tells us how our assumptions about good teaching have been absorbed from a very narrow range of ideas. I saw it in action when studying the learning activity of some home-schoolers.
When Robert Owen, who was another person Charlie used to mention, established the first infants school at New Lanark, he was criticised for his appointment of a particular teacher. He passed over somebody with good literacy skills for a person less proficient. Owen explained the prime requirement for a good teacher, was that "they were fit company for children." The more highly qualified person failed his prime requirement.
If we applied this exacting requirement to present-day teachers, the current estimates of 10% failing teachers might well be considerably inflated. If I think of all the teachers I worked with, this would certainly be true, though discretion prevents me from trying to quantify it. Perhaps it is as well that the present Chief Inspector of Schools applies different standards of judgement.
The next generation of teachers that are needed for the next learning system, however, may well be judged by the Robert Owen requirement. In his book, In Place of Schools, John Adcock predicts that teachers in the next century will be quite different to those in the present. They will need to be learning coaches, learning advisers, and learning agents. They will need good interpersonal skills, consultancy skills, and computer research skills, in order to help the members of the families on their case-load 'plan, do, and review', their personal learning programmes. They will need to be ' fit company for learners.' The skills of crowd control, and crowd instruction that dominate the behaviour of present day teachers, will not be much in evidence.
(A version of this appeared in the Roland Meighan column of Natural Parent magazine, Sept/Oct 1998)
8. A superstition called socialisation
A study of factors contributing to the development of people of high achievement was undertaken by H.G.McCurdey at the University of North Carolina, USA. It was reported in George Leonard's book Education and Ecstasy. Such people often come to be known as genius. Three factors were identified. One was a high degree of individual attention given by parents and other adults and expressed in educational activities and accompanied by abundant affection. A second factor was an environment rich in, and supportive of, imagination and fantasy. The third was only limited contact with other children but plenty of contact with supportive adults.
McCurdey concluded that in mass compulsory schooling, based on formal methods and rigid organisation, we have a long-running experiment in reducing all the above three factors to the minimum. The result is the suppression of high achievement.
Bertrand Russell started his own school at Beacon Hill when he decided that none of the available schools were the kind of places fit for his children, or anybody else's for that matter. He himself had been home-educated. In retrospect, however, he declared that his Beacon Hill school was not as successful as he had hoped. One reason he gave was that he seriously over-estimated the amount of time children need in the company of each other.
15.000 hours is a long time to be forced to spend in the company of a selected number of your peers, yet adults persist in declaring that it must be worthwhile socialisation. It may be socialisation, but the quality of it is highly suspect. Here are some recent newspaper items that touch on the theme.
Report one: Children now expect bullying to be a regular feature of school life. A national survey commissioned by Family Circle magazine showed that eight out of 10 have suffered at least one sustained attack. On average, the first bullying experience can now be expected at the age of eight.
Report two: A report commissioned by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust showed that weapons on now carried by one in ten school students. We can be relieved that UK is still behind in the international league tables, however, since in the USA, knives and guns are carried by far more students than this. But the trend is upwards and complacency is not justified.
Report three: Primary schools are to be issued drug guidelines by the Head Teachers Association. Solvent-sniffing is now found to be common amongst children as young as 7. The HTA claimed that schools were choosing to sweep the problem under the carpet by not informing the police, in order to protect the reputation of the school. The peer group in primary schools is now a key source of information about the drugs scene for children in school. Later, as the youngsters grow older, it will supply information about such things as smoking, alcohol, ecstasy tablets, junk food, and expensive teenage fashion.
Report four: The Secretary of State for Education has launched a crackdown on truancy. He sees it has a 'disengagement from education'. The crackdown was proposed as a measure to combat social exclusion. "Exclusion from what?" you might be tempted to ask. "Weapons, or drugs, or bullying?"
One of the great supporters of school as socialisation was the USA educationalist John Dewey, but he wanted schools to be democratic in style, with high levels of participation and power-sharing, not the totalitarian style based on domination and imposition. The domination model of most of our schools was not part of his plan. He saw the best kind of school as a larger-scale version of the learning approach of the best of the pioneer families of USA.
Yet there is still surprise when a family decides to opt out into home-based education! "What about the social life?" they cry. A reply based on the evidence rather than superstition is, "Exactly! It is well worth avoiding!" Another reply might be that we are a nation of slow learners who cannot work out the significance of report, after report, after report, on the negative socialisation of schooling.
Home-schooling families actually create a much higher quality of social life in their practice of family-centred education, in three ways. First of all they use the home as a springboard into the community using libraries, museums, places of interest in both town and country. In the process they rub shoulders with people of all ages. Whilst this is going on, their schooled counterparts are confined to classrooms with a limited range of peers and a limited range of adults.
Secondly, they locate and join groups such as Scouts, Guides, and Woodcraft Folk, as well as groups or classes in judo, swimming and other sports, or natural history and other pursuits.
Thirdly, they seek out other home-schooling families and do things in co-operation. They may be on an occasional basis, or as in the case of more and more groups, on a weekly basis. London thus has The Otherwise Club meeting two days a week for families to join in if they wish.
But another issue related to the socialisation superstition is discrimination against loners. At parties I have often found myself talking on the side to another person who finds the social attention-seekers getting rather wearing and the endless flow of social trivia getting increasingly boring. I have found that loners often turn out to be more interesting, composed and reflective people and, indeed, some of the most prolific contributors to ideas have been of this disposition. So if your child seems content with their own company - and yours - it is not an automatic cause for concern. Indeed, UK housing policy has just come to terms with the fact that more and more people choose to 'go solo' and this has created a growing demand for single dwellings.
Loners in school can often become the target for bullying because the normal expectation generated by the socialisation superstition, is that you will allow yourself to be taken over by the peer group. This assumes that the artificially created peer group of school is actually worth joining. In the boys grammar school I went to, I judged it was not, and preferred to make my own circle of friends away from the school. Being useful at sports, however, kept me in touch with the peer group without having to be taken over by them. Others were not so lucky.
A head teacher friend provides a final angle on socialisation. He says that the main reason the parents ask for the school to keep its school uniform is because it is protection against the lethal combination of market forces and peer group pressure, which force young people to ask for expensive trainers and other fashion-led items of clothing!
(A version of this appeared in the Roland Meighan column of Natural Parent magazine, Nov/Dec 1998)
9. Wanted! A new vocabulary for learning
The latest edition of the Journal of Curriculum Studies opens with a powerful article by a leading curriculum theorist, Bill Reid, about 'the end of curriculum'. Previously, In Place of Schools was the title of a book by John Adcock published in 1994, thus declaring the word 'school' redundant. We need, therefore, a new vocabulary to take us into the next learning system. This is not a matter of mere debate but of necessity. The shape of the next learning system has to be described in new words to convey the new approach, but also in words that make sense to parents.
But first, the old vocabulary has to go. The first casualty has to be 'school'. As a word and concept it has degenerated. It used to mean a voluntary association of learners asking questions and seeking the truth. In earlier times, when scholars (or 'schoolers') like Peter Abelard travelled from town to town, an informal 'school' of enquirers would assemble for a dialogue about his radical ideas. Somehow this idea of a voluntary gathering of learners has become debased. In his classic book, Life in Classrooms, Philip Jackson concluded that: "for all the children some of the time, and for some other children all the time, the classroom resembles a cage from which there is no escape". We need to remember that when mass compulsory schooling was first adopted in the USA, the children of the pioneer families were escorted to the state establishments by armed soldiers against the will of the families concerned. Currently, in the UK it is hailed as an advance that police cars are used to round up any reluctant learners. The undesirable outcomes are that, somehow, schools have transformed learning from one of the most rewarding of all human activities into a dull, fear-laden, boring, fragmenting, mind-shrinking, soul-shrivelling and often painful experience.
Next, the word 'curriculum' has to go. It has come to mean an imposed course study so dehumanised that all the key decisions about what to learn, when to learn, and how to learn, have been taken before any of the learners have been met and encountered as people. At one point in the National Curriculum deliberations it was suggested that we refer to 'curriculum study units' or CSU's rather than pupils, as a final dehumanisation. Bill Reid, in the Journal of Curriculum Studies, declares that this idea of curriculum, as a nationally institutionalised form of education, is now played out. Even the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, with his somewhat conservative interpretation of 'education, education, education' being synonymous with 'schooling, schooling, schooling', has stated that, "we will move away from a system that assumes every child of a particular age moves at the same pace in every subject, and develop a system directed to the particular talents and interests of every pupil."
Another word that may have to go is 'education'. Quite a few years ago, Bertrand Russell observed that we were faced with the paradoxical fact that education had become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and to freedom of thought. In common usage, education has ceased to mean 'asking questions all the time, questioning answers all the time, and questioning the questions'. Instead it has become a paper-chase. When you are asked about your education, you are expected to produce a list of set courses completed and certificates obtained, or name the place of conscription that you were required to attend.
Next, officialdom's favourite word may have to go. It is 'standards'. The idea of standards in education is both ambiguous and subjective. For some it means remembering the information designated by adults in power positions as 'essential', even though there is little agreement on what is essential. Training students to be good at the shallow learning of selected mechanical tasks enshrined in institutionally imposed syllabuses, does not produce the more important deep learning, the kind we already need, and will need more and more in the future. The first objection to shallow learning systems is that they tend to eradicate the potential to develop a deep learning, as the most recent brain activity research shows, on the principle of 'if you do not use it, you lose it'. With the habits of deep learning in your repertoire, you can do shallow learning more or less at will. The reverse, however, does not apply.
Another objection to the current definition of standards, is that most of the required shallow learning is 'junk knowledge'. I defined junk knowledge as 'something you did not need or want to know yesterday, do not need or want to know today, and are unlikely to need or want to know tomorrow.' If you do need or want to know it eventually, possessing the deeper knowledge of such things is questioning, researching, evaluating, self direction and self discipline, will enable you to learn it.
So, parents and children will need to un-learn the old vocabulary and learn a new one. The literature on the next learning system has several suggestions for a word to replace school. Some writers talk of open learning centres, or learning studios, or learning pavilions, or learning networks, or community learning sites, or learning cafes. Another option is to refer to centres for personalised education, or CPE's. Others want to retain the word school in revised formulations such as 'virtual-schools' or 'cyber-schools'. For a time I favoured 'flexi-schooling' but generally, schools proved to be resistant to the idea of becoming flexible.
The main candidate to replace the word curriculum, is the expression 'personal learning plan' or 'personal learning programme'. Personally, I favour retaining the word curriculum as part of the expression, the catalogue curriculum. Such a term implies that learners are able to construct their own pattern of learning from a catalogue of ideas and possibilities, including ready-made courses, individualised courses, and support for groups of learners who want to work democratically and design their own courses.
To replace the word education, many writers now favour referring to 'learning', or 'lifelong learning'. So, the talk is about the next learning system rather than the next education system. Even the word 'system' is sometimes questioned on the grounds that it implies mechanical imposition. But if we actually, or mentally, prefix the word with flexible - a flexible learning system - it helps people see that what is being proposed is a not a free-for-all or laissez-faire. A system can also be monitored, although the purpose of that monitoring will be to provide high quality advice and information, so that learners can make informed decisions, rather than the motive of the imposition of uniformity and standardisation.
The word and idea of standards chosen and imposed from above, can be replaced by the idea of profiles of personal achievement, which have worked in other European countries, such as Denmark and Sweden, for decades. These can include generalised assessment tests by personal choice.
A recent MORI poll, commissioned by the Campaign for Learning, found that 90% of adults were favourably inclined towards further learning for themselves. In the right environment, they were willing to undertake further learning. The bad news is that 75% said they were unhappy and alienated in the school environment, and that, therefore, they preferred to learn at home, in the local library, at their workplace - anywhere other than a school-type setting. The old vocabulary and thinking just has to go, and not just in this country. As Edward de Bono says on his web-site:
"I have not done a full survey or review of education systems around the world so that the views I express are based on personal experience. I would say that all education systems I've had contact with are a disgrace and a disaster." My verdict is the same, though some are more counter-productive than others. They are all deserts and we should not allow ourselves to be confused because we encounter the occasional oasis along the way.
(Published in Natural Parent magazine, Jan/Feb 1999, under the title of 'New words for learning')
10. Purposive conversation and effective learning
We live in an age of continuous change and the constant revision of knowledge. So, I proposed in an earlier column, that we parents need to become constant researchers. This means noting any useful ideas in new books. Here are three that challenge, inform and develop new interpretations about education. On the face of it, they are about 'full-time' home-based education, but they all ask fundamental questions about education in general. And since we are all 'part-time' home-based educators in the gaps around school hours, they apply to us all.
The most recent one is Educating Children at Home by Alan Thomas (Cassell, 1998), a psychologist interested in individualised learning methods. Since schools have a poor track record in individualisation, he turned to home educating families in both Australia and the UK where individualised learning is 'business as usual'. But what impressed Thomas was the amount that occurred largely through social conversation with an adult. He noted a remarkable amount of spontaneous incidental talk. Personally, I prefer to call this 'purposive conversation' to distinguish it from ordinary social exchanges. Thomas reminds us of the research that shows that high achieving 'genius' children have a background of both individualised attention and purposive conversational learning, which are found to be major factors in their accelerated intellectual development.
The research of Alan Thomas is based on a hundred home educating families. He shows that at home, lessons are concentrated and intensive. Little time is spent on the distractions that absorb so much time in classrooms. With increased efficiency lessons are short and often confined to the mornings only, and this leaves plenty of time for extra purposive conversation. Not all families use formal lessons and they then give over even more time to purposive conversation.
Next, learning home becomes an interactive process rather than a series of tasks to be tackled. Therefore, any mistakes that are made, rather than creating barriers to learning, becomes steps on the route to enlightenment. In this interaction, concepts are acquired, skills improved and new knowledge is gained doing the course of concrete, everyday activities or through topics that have captured the learners' interests. Parents and children can be unaware of the efficiency and power of their learning regime. Parents remarked that it was only when they looked back over a period of time, or kept a careful record, that they could see just how much high-quality learning had taken place.
Thomas reports that, "the initial worries which home educators have concerning social development gradually fade as they see their children growing up, confident and relaxed in adult company and able to relate to children of all ages." Parents come to see that it is actually the school that is cut off from the real world.
The research concludes that home educators give us a view of education which, in many respects, is markedly different from what is on offer in school. Their approach has the potential to bring about the most fundamental change in education since the advent of universal schooling in 19th-century. But we will need a new kind of institution in place of schools to bring this about.
The second book is Strengths of Their Own: home schoolers across America by Brian D. Ray (N.H.E.R.I publications, 1997). In a mere 139 pages packed with information and analysis, Dr. Brian Ray, director of the USA National Home Education Research Institute, presents the results of his recent study of home-based education. He took a USA nation-wide sample of 1657 families and their 5402 children, and all 50 states were represented. The results support his earlier findings that indicate that home-based education is the best option available, and that schooling, whether private or state, is now the second best choice. Michael Farris, of the Home School Legal Defence Association, is quoted as saying that:
"... parents who take personal responsibility for the education and socialisation of their children reap a harvest of exceptional children who are well prepared to lead this country into the next century."
The growth of home-based education in the USA seems unstoppable. At first, it was estimated that the numbers would flatten out at one percent of the school-age population. Now that it has forced its way past five percent in various States, some think it may peak at 10%. But good news is infectious, and others now predict that 50% of all children within a generation, will be learning in home-based education, for a significant portion, probably 50 %, of their school-age time.
The research identifies the positive outcomes of home-based education on topics as varied as students academic achievement, social and psychological development, and the performance of the home-educated when they become adults. Adults who were home-educated are, typically, in employment rather than unemployed, independent-minded and entrepreneurial in outlook, and think positively about their previous home education experiences.
The study explodes the 'lack of socialisation' myth. Children were engaged in a wide variety of social activities spending, on average, 10 hours a week in such things as music classes, play activities outside the home, sporting activities, church organised groups, Scouts and Guides.
In an earlier study, 58 percent of families have computers in the home. In Ray's latest study, this has risen to 86 percent. The children use computers for educational purposes, but the only subject to which there was a significant positive difference, was reading, since those using computers scored higher in reading tests.
A personalised, self-designed curriculum was used for 71 per cent of the students rather than a set, purchased package. The programme selected a variety of elements from the information-rich society in which we now live, including some pre-packaged items. Ray, like Thomas, explores the methods of learning and also identifies purposive conversation, as a key reason for the success of home-based education.
Ray suggests that home-based education may eliminate, or at least reduce, the potential negative effects of certain background factors. He shows that the success of the home educated is unrelated to low family incomes, low parental educational achievement, parents not having formal training as teachers, race or ethnicity of the student, gender of the student, not having a computer in the home, starting formal education late in life, or being in a large family. He explodes another myth - that home-based education is for the well-off. The average family earnings for home-educating families was below the national average.
Finally, there is the intriguing indication that 'the family that learns together, stays together'; home-educating families show signs of being more stable, with their members more fulfilled and happy as a result.
The third book is The Art of Education: reclaiming your family, community and self, by Linda Dobson, (Home Education Press, 1995). For Linda Dobson, school erases key abilities such as curiosity, imagination, creativity, inner peace, humour, artistry, self-motivation, and intuition. In return, school offers "indoctrination in accepted ideas".
School develops bad habits, Dobson observes, and a notable one is learning to rely on experts to solve problems for us. For Dobson, home-based education is family-centred education where the members grow into self-reliance and healthy scepticism of experts and professionals. It uses the principles of natural education which require only a guide to provide encouragement, support, some direction, and a learner ready to discover and create goals and values that are personally meaningful. In appendix A to the book, the list of famous adults who were home-schooled includes seven presidents of the United States and various scientists, inventors, authors, explorers and business people.
In proposing that the government way is an inadequate one, and that family-centred education is superior, Dobson sets about exploding various myths about home-based education. She does this by describing a day in the life of a home educator. All the wealth of learning she lists, are "accomplished in the warm, loving, safe environment of home! No bells, no tests, no peer pressure, no competition! Individual attention, individual progress, individual choice! The art of education - pure, stressless, naturally occurring ... "
We learn how the Dobson family began home-based education. The oldest child's brief stint in public school kindergarten had already revealed a number of worrying features. There was the stress of formal book learning begun too soon. Then there was the behaviour-altering effects of peer pressure. Next, there was the personality-altering effects of school discipline. Finally, there was the dispiriting effects of boredom and irrelevance.
Home-based education worked for the children, but also expanded the life of Linda Dobson: "As the children acquired basic skills - reading, writing, arithmetic - their interests expanded. So did mine. Their sense of wonder blossomed. So did mine. Their abilities multiplied. So did mine. Their confidence increased. So did mine." Some friends were impressed but protested that they could not cope with being with their children all day long. They failed to see that the irritating behaviour of their children is a consequence of schooling. Other friends worried about the cost, but the sum of money needed is flexible, especially now that we live in an information-rich society with plenty of free resources available.
Another gain was a strengthened family life. "Our institutions still give lip-service to the family as the first and most important building block society. But by destroying the natural cycle of love and respect, inherent in family life through their demands that children 'socialise' in artificially inflated institutional settings, they are contributing to the destruction of society itself." Human beings, she declares, are capable of wise decision-making when they are not paralysed by authoritarian hierarchies or impersonal structures that diffuse individual responsibility.
The radical thought is developed that education could be improved with one simple reform - eliminate schools. Instead, establish learning centres dedicated to meeting the unique needs of all the learners who took up the invitation to attend. Several examples of these learning centres are described: Paris, Lexington Virginia, Providence Rhode Island, and Kansas City, and the Centre for Personalised Education Trust is supporting the founding of such centres in UK.
(Published in Natural Parent magazine, March/April 1999, under the title of 'Talk that's far from cheap')
* * * * *
[There is a fourth book, also by Linda Dobson, which is of particular interest to anyone actually starting or considering full-time home-based education. It is The Home Schooling Book of Answers: the 88 most important questions answered by home schooling's most respected voices (1998). All the books listed above are obtainable from HERO Books, 58 Portland Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 5DL Telephone 01273 775560]
Roland Meighan - January 1999
11. Back to the Future?
Headline: Chief Inspector of Schools Condemns National Curriculum!
"I am ashamed to have been a party to it," he says.
Teaching has become a debased activity according to the Chief Inspector of Schools:
"In nine schools out of ten, on nine days out of ten, in nine lessons out of ten, the teacher is engaged in laying thin films of information on the surface of the child's mind and then after a brief interval he is skimming these off in order to satisfy himself that they have been duly laid".
These observations of the Chief Inspector of Schools, made in the early 1900s, can hardly fail to sound a controversial note in the UK today. At present it is quite hard for anyone to suggest that there may be more to education than a ceaseless quest for a better way to force-feed information to children.
But the man who was responsible for supervising the first National Curriculum of the early 1900s, was the Senior Chief Inspector, Edmond Holmes. He wrote a report in which he condemned all that he had been doing for the last thirty years, and admitted his sense of shame for being a part of it. He had to resign as a result of telling the truth as he saw it. He went on to write two books establishing his case, but his inconvenient views were quietly buried. "He appears in histories of education as a footnote, or as one whose ideas are acknowledged but never allowed into the main current of thinking, either in his own time or later," writes Chris Shute in his recent book Edmond Holmes and the Tragedy of Education.
If England wanted to have an education system fit for a new century, Holmes declared, it would have to stop telling children what to do and compelling them to do it, since this produced only passivity, lassitude, unhealthy docility or, in the stronger, more determined spirits, 'naughtiness'. Uniformity was just plain bad education.
Holmes wrote of the "tendency (of the examination system) to arrest growth, to deaden life, to paralyse the higher faculties ... to involve education in an atmosphere of unreality and self-deception." He called this system a source of 'infinite mischief' which obscured the true purposes of education.
One of the most disturbing features of the current educational scene is the likelihood that we shall now enter the next century with the same basic model of mass, uniform, conscription-based schooling that Holmes saw as a tragedy. The battery-hen, 'tell them then test them' approach still reigns supreme. Holmes was a committed Christian and saw all this as unchristian; if God had intended us for uniformity, we would have been created so, as in the case of ants or bees. Therefore he saw the imposition of a uniform curriculum on children by adults as an affront to his religion.
Holmes was not the only whistle-blower. Bertrand Russell wrote: "There must be in the world many parents who, like the present author, have young children whom they are anxious to educate as well as possible, but reluctant to expose to the evils of existing educational institutions." Also, Albert Einstein observed that, "It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail."
Another whistle-blower, Winston Churchill had this to say on the matter: "Schools have not necessarily much to do with education ... they are mainly institutions of control where certain basic habits must be instilled in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school." Education officials responsible for the drafting of 1988 Education Reform Act, which re-established the 1904 form of curriculum, also wanted 'institutions of control' for they were recorded as saying: "We are in a considerable period of social change. There may be social unrest, but we can cope with the Toxteths. But if we have a highly educated and idle population we may possibly anticipate more serious social conflict. People must be educated once more to know their place."
Are there any current glimmers of hope? Well there are several. The first and most radical is the home-schooling movement which, on based on the growth rate of the last 20 years, is now expected to account for 25% of the USA school-age population by the year 2008. UK appears to be running about five years behind.
The second is flexi-time. By 2008 there may be a further 25% on flexi-time arrangements - 65,000 families are reported as taking up the options of ISPs (Independent Study Programmes) this year, in California alone.
Thirdly, the Charter Schools movement has been growing apace in USA in the last five years, modelled on the Danish and Dutch models. Here groups of parents, sometimes in co-operatives with teachers, set up small schools or local learning centres with State aid. my USA colleagues tell me that President Clinton is strong in his support for this movement,
Fourthly, most USA States have made a start in replacing schools with All Year Round Education Centres which open eight in the morning until eight at night, every day of the year. These centres are able to offer much more flexibility in learning opportunities to fit the needs of individuals, families and adult learners and much more flexible contracts for teachers. These institutions are also in a position to offer ISPs .
A catalyst in these developments can be, and often is, communications and information technology (CIT) which enables the development of cyber schools, learning networks, virtual schools and other flexible, computer linked possibilities. CIT also allows initiatives with truants. In Japan, teachers communicate with truants using e-mail and multimedia technology, sometimes holding video conferences with the children. The feedback has so far been positive. Michael Fitzpatrick, in Times Educational Supplement, 10/4/98 reports that the approach stems from the view that bullying and the pressure to succeed are driving pupils to truancy. Bullied students who commit suicide inevitably become headline news.
Another glimmer of hope is contained in the words of Prime Minister Tony Blair that I mentioned in a previous edition: "... the revolution in business ... will, over time, take place in education, too. We will move away from a system that assumes every child of a particular age moves at the same pace in every subject, and develop a system directed to the particular talents and interests of every pupil."
These words carry a serious implication. If he can envisage a better system of learning, what are we waiting for? Are the present generation of young learners being fobbed off with a second-rate experience for no good reason? Why is he tolerant of the current Chief Inspector of Schools devoted to the regressive ideology of education based on fear and domination, that Holmes despised?
What can parents do about all this? Our local councillors, national politicians and journalists need to be educated about these things. Letters to newspapers asking questions about these matters, even when they are not published, help influence opinion and so do letters to MPs. Introducing these idea into conversations also helps. The growth of home-based education, for example, has taken place mostly by word of mouth and through a trickle of newspaper and magazine articles. Why not ask your MP about the words of Tony Blair and their implications? I would be interested to have copies of any replies.
Later this year, Falmer Press will be publishing a new whistle-blower book entitled National Curriculum, National Disaster by Rhys Griffiths, based on several years field work. There are strong echoes in this work of the denunciation of the first national curriculum by Edmond Holmes. Get hold of a copy, read it and start a debate about it.
The anthropologist Margaret Mead encourages us: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
(Published in Natural Parent magazine, May/June 1999, under the title of 'Putting children in their place')
* * * * *
Edmond Holmes and 'The Tragedy of Education' by Chris Shute, ISBN 1-900219-12-3, published by Educational Heretics Press, costs £7-95, from 113 Arundel Drive, Bramcote Hills, Nottingham NG9 3FQ
Roland Meighan, March 1999
12. The superstition of school 'standards'
'Standards' has become one of officialdom's favourite words. But the idea of standards in schooling is both ambiguous and subjective. I will illustrate this with a story. My colleague was in a primary classroom watching a child do the standard achievement tests. The boy was busy colouring in balloons - the more he coloured in the time allowed, the test decreed, the higher his achievement. He had coloured in three, whereas others had coloured in ten or eleven. He spoke to my colleague, sensing a sympathetic ear: "They say I am slow, but I say I am thorough." But who says speed is more worthy than thoroughness?
For some 'standards' means remembering the information designated by adults as 'essential' and therefore enshrined in syllabuses set by complete strangers. Training students to be good at this shallow learning of the selected mechanical tricks of institutionally imposed syllabuses, does not produce the more important deep learning, the kind we need more and more in the future. Shallow learning requires pattern-receiving, whereas deep learning requires pattern-making. Recent research on the brain notes that the brain we are born with is 'wired' or 'programmed' for pattern-making and so young children learn their mother tongue naturally by using this facility and not by the pattern-receiving activity of formal instruction. The brain has to 'rewire' to cope with regime of constant pattern-receiving and can lose it previous strengths in the process.
Observers like John Holt have concluded that children are less capable as independent learners after years of schooling than they were at the outset, partly because their pattern-making facility has been eroded. If he is right, we parents need to start thinking carefully about the experiences our children are having.
Indeed shallow learning systems do tend to eradicate the potential to develop deep learning, on the 'if you do not use it, you lose it' principle. The reverse, oddly enough, does not apply. With deep learning habits in your repertoire, you can do shallow learning more or less at will. With this in mind, some will define 'standards' as standards of deep learning. Thus Edward de Bono is well known for his advocacy of helping children learn to think straight as the first priority, and this is part of his reason for declaring all schooling systems known to him as disasters: "I have not done a full survey or review of education systems around the world so that the views I express are based on personal experience. I would say that all education systems I've had contact with are a disgrace and a disaster." Is this a Red Alert for us parents when our leaders keep telling us we must keep up with the others? On the other hand, the character CJ, in The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin, used to declare, "I never got where I am today by thinking." Which vision do we want for our young, thinking people or gullible ones?
Standards and standardisation are closely related ideas. The philosopher John Stuart Mill warned us of the trap: "A general State Education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another, and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body." Now, this kind of schooling has always appealed to totalitarians. We entered this century with this kind of system and now the government proposes to enter the next with it, more or less, intact. Yet the Chief Inspector of Schools, Edmond Holmes was describing this kind of system as 'The Tragedy of Education' in 1911, and was fired for saying so.
Another objection to the current definition of standards is that most of the required shallow learning is junk knowledge. I define junk knowledge as, 'something you did not need or want to know yesterday, do not need or want to know today, and are unlikely to need or want to know tomorrow'. If you do need or want to know it at sometime, possessing the deep knowledge of such things as questioning, researching and evaluating will enable you to learn it. Indeed, we are all fated to live all our lives in ignorance of most of what is around us because the world of knowledge is now so vast and it is changing all the time. Without the research skills and some personal confidence derived from practising them, we cannot even make sense of what is necessary to our immediate well-being, and are forced to rely fatalistically on 'experts' who often fail to agree amongst themselves.
Those willing to impose their ideas of standards on others will sooner or later talk about 'the basics'. But the survivor of a concentration camp had this to say on the matter of basics: "Reading, writing and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human." His eyes had seen the results of a 'high standards' education system - gas chambers built by learned engineers, children poisoned by educated physicians, infants killed by trained nurses, women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates. The manner of learning is as critical as the learning itself. Learning literacy in a bully institution makes you a literate bully.
But learning to read as early as possible, has become the latest superstition. The contrary view is that learning to read before you have learned to think effectively, just leaves you in a state of gullibility, a sitting duck for propaganda, the simplistic ideas of the tabloids and a multitude of spin doctors. This is why Robert Owen, industrialist founder of the first infants school, thought that ten years old was early enough to start the mechanics of reading. By that time the young would have had enough experiences, conversation, debate and exploration to have learnt to think straight. But we do not have to be inflexible about this. Pat Farengo, in his address to the London home-education conference in April, explained that his daughters had all learnt to read at different ages, one early, one about the common age of seven years and another several years later. Being a home-based educator, he was able to have the flexibility to stay cool about these individual differences.
Another basic we are asked to accept is the superiority of ruthless, competitive behaviours. Our leaders keep telling us that the next century requires this of us and have insisted that it be the first aim of schooling. Nat Needle, a US writer responds: "... if the 21st century becomes the story of human beings around the world pitted against each other in a struggle for well-being, even survival, this will only be because we failed to imagine something better and insist on it for ourselves and our children."
In contrast to the view that the victors in the 'strong versus weak' battle deserve our adulation for setting the pace for the rest of us, Needle reminds us of another view. It is that the strongest are those who devote themselves to strengthening the weak, to keeping the whole community afloat, to ploughing their gifts back into the common field through service to others. He concludes, "I don't care to motivate my children by telling them that they will have to be strong to survive the ruthless competition. I'd rather tell them that the world needs their wisdom, their talents, and their kindness, so much so that the possibilities for a life of service are without limits of any kind. I'd like to share with them the open secret that this is the path to receiving what one needs in a lifetime, and to becoming strong."
This extract from the current Living Green journal adds to this an alternative to relentless consumerism - the virtues of 'living lightly' - by saying: "try to live simply. A simple lifestyle freely chosen is a source of strength. Do not be persuaded into buying what you do not need or cannot afford. Do you keep yourself informed about the effects your style of living is having on the global economy and environment?"
In the first part of this century, Bertrand Russell observed: 'We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.' Since the model of education he described is the same as the one we still have, in all key respects, we parents and grandparents have to ask whether we are having imposed on us entirely the wrong standards.
(First published in the Roland Meighan
column of Natural Parent magazine July/Aug 1999
under the title of 'How your child can be a deep learner'.)
13. You become what you read?
It usually takes about 30 hours to learn the mechanics of reading, according to Paulo Freire, based on his work with adult literacy schemes in a variety of countries. This is confirmed in the experience of various home-based educators, though some would say it can take up to 60 hours with children. If learning to read takes longer than 60 hours, or fails altogether, there are several possible reasons. The first is that the learning situation is learner-hostile. A second is that the learner is not yet motivated to learn to read and has been forced to learn too early. A third is that the learner is dyslexic.
Robert Owen, the industrialist who founded an early infant school in 1816, inclined to the view that children should not be troubled with the mechanics of reading until they were about ten years of age. Until then they should be engaged in collecting a wide range of experiences of the world and in purposive conversation and debate, to develop their powers of critical thinking. In modern psychological terms, they were to develop deep learning of understanding before the shallow learning of mechanical operations.
Rudolph Steiner, on the other hand, was inclined to think that the age of seven was appropriate. The current orthodoxy is to start much earlier than this, ignoring the evidence that this risks early failure, feelings of inadequacy, and a general reaction against learning. But in London recently, Pat Farengo, a prominent USA home-schooler, explained how one of his daughters had learnt to read early, one at about seven years of age and the other much later at 10 years of age. All three were now competent and voracious readers. The flexibility that home-based education allows means that such individual differences can be accommodated.
Alan Thomas, in his recent book, Children Learning at Home, indicates how many home educating families experience this variety and cope with it positively. Parents, however, need the courage to resist any current orthodoxy, and also to deal with their own anxieties. My own son learnt to read early, and when he chose to try school at five years of age, he already had a reading age of twelve. I was, at the time, somewhat anxious that he had learnt to read too early, but not foolish enough to have discouraged him. A colleague who had the same 'problem' told me how the head teacher had thrown up her hands in horror, and told him that he and his wife had completely ruined his daughter's infant school experience by allowing her to read early. The disease of orthodoxy can strike in many forms!
Another current orthodoxy is to promote the teaching of reading by phonics, often confusing two variations, synthetic and analytical approaches, as the one right away. When my son was learning to read, I was also running reading workshops for young student teachers, and laid due stress on the need to pay attention to phonics, as did everyone I knew who was training teachers at the time. My son took to the Breakthrough to Literacy reading scheme with its personal word folders and personal word-building folders - this last being the analytical phonics element of the scheme. My son was politely but persistently dismissive of the word-building folder, and seemed to think this was a device to hold him back. He just wanted to know what any new word said and he would memorise it. From this experience, I began to learn to be more cautious about the use of phonics.
Another note of caution sounded. A colleague who went blind demonstrated his new reading machine to me. He would open a book, place it on the machine which would then read it to him. He explained that the development of the machine had been held up for several years because they tried to use a phonics-based approach. As a result of the machine could not attain fluency. Only when they switched to whole word recognition approach, with phonics as a backup to attack unfamiliar words, did the machine gain fluency. The machine appeared to be in sympathy with my son!
A recent experience has reconfirmed my caution. I began to learn Esperanto, an entirely phonetically regular language. In consequence I can read out loud to you a whole page of the language, but have only a little understanding of what I have performed so convincingly.
It may be that the general obsession with reading is becoming dated. The sale of books in the USA is in decline as more and more people get the information they need by electronic means. This includes television, radio, video, and telephone. Mobile telephones that link you to a data-bank, that then talks the information back to you, are increasingly becoming part of our experience. Telephone banking is but one example of this. Another is telephoned directory enquiries, and the telephone speaking clock has been with us for many years. Moreover, I am writing this article with a voice-driven computer. With an additional piece of software, the computer would read it back to me, to save me the chore of reading the screen. A long-standing friend who is severely dyslexic, Geoff Harrision, has been liberated by this technology, and now spends some time helping edit a magazine.
Looking ahead, the flight deck of the Star Ship Enterprise, does not utilise reading because all decisions are based on voice-dialogue with the ship's computer. The commander might be dyslexic - it would be of no consequence. We are moving steadily into a new age of oracy. Reading will continue to be useful, and for many a source of enjoyment, but probably less and less decisive. Even now, the gypsy culture in our midst manages without reliance on reading. We, ourselves, are often illiterate the moment we set foot in a foreign country, but somehow we get by.
We can often forget the dangers of reading. You can easily become what you read. If your reading does not go beyond the tabloid newspaper level, you become enslaved to the tabloid mentality, which has been described as superstitious, dogmatic, nationalistic and inclined towards racism, sexism and ageism. This idea was explored in full in Richard Hoggart's book The Uses of Literacy. Unless learners have developed the skills and habits of and discrimination, or 'crap detection', as Postman and Weingartner put it their book Teaching as a Subversive Activity, they are at the mercy of self-interested persuaders. Most learners pass out of school just literate enough to be conned, to be spun by the spin doctors, and to watch the more mindless shows on television.
We need to go way beyond mere mechanical literacy, to critical literacy where people can see through the linguistic, semantic, intellectual and other deceptions which now dominate our culture. Hoggart restated his points in a Guardian Education article (2nd December 1997):
"In a democracy, people have a right to read the Sun, and only the Sun, if they wish. But would you be happy if, by the time your own children and grown-up, they too 'read' only the Sun, watched only the more idiotic television programmes for almost 40 hours a week and, if they bothered with books it all, read-only formulaic market fodder? The founding principal of critical literacy ... must be to develop understanding of the nature of democracy itself, of the duties it lays on us and the rights we may then claim; the two are inseparable."
Hoggart is not impressed by the results of the reading industry so far: "But the great majority, insofar as they read at all, go round and round, wooed on to that carousel of repetitive rubbish ceaselessly operated by the two-syllabled press and the stereotyped paperbacks." Perhaps Robert Owen was less zany than we might think in wanting to leave the mechanics of reading until much later and develop the powers of critical thinking first.
(First published in the Roland Meighan column of Natural Parent, Sept/Oct 1999 under the title of 'the writing's on the wall'.)
14. The question of damage limitation:
and can 'organic and toxin-free' learning be a reality?
Every parent is a home-based educator until children reach the age of 5. After that, all parents are still home-based educators, although some are full-time, whereas others use schools for part of the time, during the weekdays, on those weeks the schools are open. For those who either choose to use schools, or necessity forces them to, I want to open up the question of damage limitation.
I had to face this question when, some years ago now, my son reached the age of 5. His mother, Shirley, was an experienced infants teacher, and I was an experienced secondary teacher and teacher educator. With our insider knowledge, we both understood the serious limitations of compulsory mass schooling, whether state or private, and set out to offer him a home-based education alternative. Ironically, he elected to try school, so his parents had to turn their attention to mounting a damage limitation programme.
Why was this necessary? A few years ago I wrote an article entitled "Schooling can seriously damage your education". I now think I was too cautious and should have entitled it, "Schooling will damage your education". The only question in my mind is how much damage will be done and in which dimensions.
There is some good news about schooling, however, as Everett Reimer indicated when he wrote, "some true educational experiences are bound to occur in schools. They occur however, despite school and not because of it." Some teachers manage, despite our domination riddled schooling system, to swim against the tide of restrictions and regulations, and create episodes of genuine humanity and genuine learning. I tried to be such a teacher and so did my wife Shirley. As my son put it, the good news was that he was able to find "bits of treasure in the wreck" of the schooling system, because of such teachers.
It is also true that the homes of some children are despotic or neglectful, so that even a coercive school provides a respite. Schools also provide a respite for parents from their children, so that they can pursue their careers, or whatever.
But the long-term effect of mass, compulsory coercive schooling is damage. As the New York prize-winning teacher, John Gatto put it, he was employed to teach bad habits. These ranged from bad intellectual habits, bad social habits, bad emotional habits, to bad moral and political habits. Neither the 'successful' pupils nor the 'unsuccessful' pupils escaped. For starters, he identified seven of these bad habits. I have mentioned them before, but I think they are worth repeating.
John Taylor Gatto recognised that what he was really paid to teach was an unwritten curriculum made up of seven ideas. The first was confusion. He was required to teach disconnected facts not meaning, infinite fragmentation not cohesion. The second basic idea was class position. Children were to be taught to know their place by being forced into the rigged competition of schooling. A third lesson was that of indifference. He saw he was paid to teach children not to care too much about anything. The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing: students never have a complete experience for it is all on the instalment plan.
The fourth lesson was that of emotional dependency for, by marks and grades, ticks and stars, smiles and frowns, he was required to teach children to surrender their wills to authority. The next idea to be passed on was that of intellectual dependency. They must learn that good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do and believe. The sixth idea is that of provisional self-esteem. Self-respect is determined by what others say about you in reports and grades; you are told what you are worth and self-evaluation is ignored. The final, seventh lesson is that you cannot hide. You are watched constantly and privacy is frowned upon.
The consequence of teaching the seven lessons is a growing indifference to the adult world, to the future, to most things except the diversion of toys, computer games, 'getting stoned' as the height of having a good time, and violence. School, Gatto concludes, is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. School 'schools' very well but it hardly educates at all. Indeed, Paul Goodman entitled his book Compulsory Mis-education. But all this is good preparation for being gullible to the other controlling institutions, such as universities, but especially television, a theme developed in Gatto's book, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.
In contrast, home-based education can be seen as analogous to organic farming – a system with the toxins avoided. Our 'damage limitation', however, meant 'building up the immune system' to fight the toxins of the schooling system.
Other parents were puzzled as to why we saw what they regarded as 'good' schools, which today would no doubt get OFSTED approval, as 'educational impoverishment zones'. 'A good uniform means a good school', they declared. 'And probably a bad education based on uniformity', we responded. John Gatto had an explanation for this puzzled response: "It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that ... only a small number can imagine a different way to do things."
So what did our policy of damage limitation look like? The first item was a principle: we would never pretend the school was right when it was wrong. If it proved necessary and with our son's approval, we would take the trouble to challenge the school when it was in the wrong, even if this meant we were labelled 'nuisance', 'interfering', or 'bad' parents. Part of this principle was never to shirk a dialogue with our son about what was happening in school and its implications. Thus, when a teacher, unable to find a guilty party, punished the whole class, we pointed out that this was a common fascist procedure, but also why the authoritarian system pushed teachers into this corner.
The second item was a positive programme of activities to offset some of the bad habits John Gatto identified. To some extent, we just continued the programme of activities used between the ages of zero and five years, providing a learner-friendly environment that was personalised and democratic, stressing fun and happiness. This involved construction toys, board games, electronic games, watching TV programmes together, playing games in the garden or park - business as usual in fact.
We located out-of-school clubs and activities such as Judo groups, holiday soccer coaching courses, holiday table tennis events, and provided transport for groups of friends to go skating in the evening. One 'bit of treasure in the wreck' was the Local Education Authority's Saturday morning orchestra facility. This encouraged young musicians to gain experience with their own or with loaned instruments, in beginner ensembles and, eventually, to the senior orchestra. The LEA also had an Outdoor Centre in Wales and an Arts Residential Centre which were sources of worthwhile week-long courses.
The local naturalist society had regular Sunday outings to gardens, arboretums, bird watching sites ranging from woodland, to moorland, to seashore - even to sewage farms where we could view birds such as black terns – all in the company of enthusiasts. On occasion, we found ourselves at the Gibraltar Point Field Station for a weekend of investigation where father gained 'brownie points' for being the first to notice a rare red-backed shrike. The 'I Spy' booklets were a useful cheap resource but another favourite purchase was the magazine, The Puzzler.
We organised our own day trips to seaside, to parks with fun-fairs, to houses, to cities and museums, to sporting events ranging from the local soccer and cricket teams to the world table tennis championships. There were National Car Shows and the Birmingham Show to experience. We involved ourselves in a local amateur dramatic society that welcomed children to help out backstage. Also, the family, including grandparents, would often come along to meet the families, when I was researching home-based education. There were package holidays abroad, to Sweden to visit friends and also to Spain.
Perhaps none of this seems all that remarkable, and families across the social range do some selection of these things, according to their means and inclinations. But we consciously saw all these activities as opportunities for purposive conversation and mutual learning and an antidote to the effects of schooling. We could try to provide holistic and integrated learning to offset the fragmented approach of the school, and use any opportunities to practice the democratic skills of negotiation, consultation, accommodation, and co-operation - the skills that authoritarian schools usually discount and discourage.
What was achieved? Well, perhaps partial success could be claimed. Just choosing to be there, transformed the experience. At seven years, our son was telling us that, 'school did not get to him like the others, because he had an escape tunnel ready and waiting'. At eleven, he went to the Open Day at the secondary school where 300 children from the feeder schools in the district were in attendance, but he was conscious of being the only one making a decision whether to go or not. The others were conscripts. Later, we saw the head teacher where my son informed him that he was giving the school a term's contract to see how things went. I came to realise that my son regarded the school in the same way that an anthropologist regards a tribe being studied – he was in the role of a participant observer.
The switch from school to further education college was eventually a considerable release from the domination of schooling, and independence of spirit and mind were better able to flourish. On the other hand, moving away to university meant that this institution just had a field day. The intellectual dependence Gatto talks about now asserted itself in the form of courses and modules requiring replication of approved material and rejecting any alternative or independent analysis as a threat to the authority of 'experts'. (During twenty years working in universities, this is what I observed happening as a matter of course, and pointing it out in committees was never well received.)
Is a damage limitation policy really necessary? And does every parent using schools need one? John Stuart Mill in On Liberty (1859, p177) observed that:
"A general State Education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another, and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body."
This seems to me to be just the opposite of an 'organic, toxin-free learning' outcome.
(First published in the Roland Meighan column of Natural Parent, Jan/Feb 2000 under the title of 'How to survive school'.)
15. 'Natural' Curriculum or National Curriculum?
'Natural' knowledge and a superstition called 'Subjects'
A curriculum can be defined, in simple terms, as 'a course of study'. Knowledge can be taken, for now, to be some kind of content that is the substance of a curriculum'.
The latest research on the brain tells us that babies 'hit the ground running' as active learners. Their brains are already programmed to begin their lifelong course of study by interacting with their environment - unlike a cow, say, that is programmed to work in set routines. Indeed, one definition of what it is to be human is given in the title of a John Holt book - we are human because we are Learning All the Time.
The 'natural' curriculum is the 'course of study' that humans develop as fast as physical and other conditions permit. So, babies accumulate knowledge through activities such as play, imitation, and interaction with any adults around. Play is best seen as children's work: one grandparent noted recently that her granddaughter, at the end of a refreshment and chat break, suddenly said, "I must get on with my play-work now."
The content of this natural curriculum is a set of existential questions. They include: Who am I? Who are you? Who are they? Where do we belong? Who gets what? How do we find out? Where are we going? How am I doing? Who decides what? It is a set of questions that stays with us permanently with the answers being reviewed constantly throughout our lives, as we assemble our tool-kit of knowledge. From time to time, we may engage with those attempts at systematic bodies of knowledge called subjects, to help provide some answers to these questions.
The question, 'Who am I?' will be redefined many times as a person passes through the roles of infant, child, adolescent, young adult, single person, couple, married person, parent, older person, and so on. When young children reach five, they are asking, on average, 30 questions an hour based on their natural curriculum. At this stage, one provisional answer to the question of 'how do we find out?' has been gained, by achieving competence in the mother tongue. Until quite recently in human history, this natural curriculum was sufficient to keep us going throughout life. But then
The story of the animals and the birdsThe animals and birds decided to create a school. They devised subjects for study which were climbing, flying, running, swimming and digging. They could not agree on which was most important, so they said: "Everyone must do everything - in case they need these things in the future".
The rabbits were expert at running, but some nearly drowned in the swimming class. The experience shook their confidence and they could no longer run as well as before.
The eagles were terrific at flying, but very poor at digging and were assigned to a extra digging classes. This took up more and more time, and some forgot how to fly well. And so on with the other animals and birds - moles became less confident at digging, otters at swimming.
The birds and animals no longer had the opportunity to shine in their best areas because they were all forced to do things that did not respect the natural curriculum.
The eagles got a bit fed-up with digging. They called a meeting of the birds.
"We need a curriculum suited to us birds," they said. All agreed.
"Nest building should be a core subject." All agreed.
The eagles spoke: "The best nests, 'real' or 'proper' nests, are made of twigs on high ledges, because they are the nests of us eagles - the 'high flyers', as you might say, with our 'high culture'."
Now eagles are big and powerful and liable to eat smaller birds, so that was somewhat reluctantly agreed.
So kingfishers and wrens and lapwings and swallows all tried to build nests of twigs on high ledges. It wasn't easy when you were used to holes in river banks, or weaving cocoon-like structures of grass and moss, or plastering mud under the eaves of houses.
What was needed was a stage of lower ledges - a kind of 'key stage one' of nest building.
"It might help," the eagles said, "if you wore our brown speckled uniform. Nobody seems to know why, but learning seems to go better if you wear a uniform. So, well done sparrows, you already have the right idea, but you kingfishers ... well, we love the gear, and all those nice bright colours ... but for learning, you will need to put on a brown speckled uniform." And so the experiment continued in brown speckled uniforms.
But, the swallows went south for the winter. In the rest periods they got to talking about the new birds curriculum. Nests on ledges were rather draughty. The ledges had got rather crowded and some bullying incidents had taken place. What was wrong with mud-plastered nests on the side of warm buildings, anyway?
The swallows resolved to be brave and confront the authority of the eagles:
"When we get back we shall demand the right to have a diversity of nest types again."
"Yes, and we shall demand the right to manage our own learning."
"And if we decide the best thing is learning in the family and not under the supervision of the eagles, we shall demand the right to resume the natural curriculum!"
It is about 150 years ago, since an institution called the compulsory school was introduced. And suddenly, the natural curriculum was displaced. The natural questions became replaced by an imposed curriculum based on THEIR questions, THEIR required answers, and THEIR required assessment. The message is dramatically changed: "Your experience, your concerns, your hopes, your fears, your desires, your interests, they count for nothing. What counts is what we are interested in, what we care about, and what we have decided you are to learn." John Holt, in The Underachieving School, p. 161)
In her study of children after one year of schooling, entitled Rules Routines and Regimentation, Ann Sherman found that this message was already being absorbed, but with considerable reluctance. Children were aware of the 'hijacking' process, but felt powerless to do anything about it, and saw no alternative but to surrender to it. Ironically, this process is called giving young people their 'entitlement'.
What is achieved by this substitution of a false entitlement in place of the real one? Richmal Crompton's William was puzzled: "When I ask my father anythin' about lessons he always says he's forgotten 'cause it's so long since he was at school, and then he says I gotter work hard at school so's I'll know a lot when I'm grown up. Doesn't seem sense to me. Learnin' a lot of stuff ... jus' to forget it, ..."
In the textbook, A Sociology of Educating, I outlined three theories of knowledge. They were past-based, present-based and future-based. Subjects belong to the past-based category since they are relying on the arrangement of knowledge set up by our ancestors. They have some uses as part of the tool-kit of knowledge, but to overstress their importance is to indulge in a kind of ancestor-worship. The world of subjects is fragmented, but the world and human experience are holistic. There are no boxes in the real world separating History from Geography or Mathematics from Science or Chemistry from Physics. There are no such things as Biology, or Economics or Sociology out there. But because the world and human experience are vast, we choose, for convenience, to look sometimes at one part of reality, and to ask certain kinds of question about it. We may be thinking like a historian; if we look at another part, ask another question, we may be thinking like a biologist, or an economist, or a psychologist, or a philosopher. But these different ways of looking at reality can trap us into serious distortions. Subjects can easily become a superstition and be held up as the tool-kit rather than a useful part of it.
Present-based knowledge is much closer to the natural curriculum idea and addresses current topics such as the mass media, terrorism, fashion, poverty - the agenda of newspapers and television investigations. All these require integrated forms of knowledge and only draw on subject knowledge as appropriate.
Future-based knowledge is different again, and stresses the need to acquire the outlook and skills of the researcher. It starts with a realist appraisal of what we can know: "We are all of us, no matter how hard we work, no matter how curious we are, condemned to grow relatively more ignorant every day we live, to know less and less of the sum of what is known I expect to live my entire life in uncertainty about as ignorant and uncertain and confused as I am now, and I have learned to live with this, not to worry about it. I have learned to swim in uncertainty the way a fish swims in water." (John Holt, The Underachieving School, p.142 and 144)
It has become a commonplace to say that in the future, the key knowledge will be 'knowing how to learn' and also 'how to unlearn'. I think we can be more precise than this and say that the key knowledge, though not the only useful knowledge, is to be a confident and competent researcher. This requires knowing where information can be found, how to ask appropriate questions, how to check out good answers from bad answers, how to question the questions. The Internet and computers are valuable aids in this task of becoming a habitual researcher. Schools, with subject learning as their aim, are poor at this since success in school has come to mean remembering the answers to teachers' questions long enough to repeat them in tests.
John Holt tells us how he answered one young learners question about how to learn history: "I said, "I think you may be asking me two questions: one, how do I learn more about history, and two, how do I get better grades in history class in school? The first thing to understand is that these are completely different and separate activities, having almost nothing to do with each other. If you want to learn more about how to find out about what things were like in the past, I can give you some hints about that. And if you want to find out how to get better grades in your History class, I can give you some hints about that. But they will not be the same hints" (preface to Learning All the Time)
When people say that we should learn and memorise things that may be useful to us in the future, we should remember that this is the 'squirrels and nuts' theory of education. Squirrels collect nuts, bury them and then try to locate them later. Whether this works for squirrels, I cannot say. But as Richmal Crompton's William might say, 'it seems nutty to me' as the dominant idea on which to base a learning system.
George Bernard Shaw declared that "what we want to see is the child in pursuit of knowledge, not knowledge in pursuit of the child." I take this as a plea to return to the learner-managed 'natural' curriculum, with personal learning plans supported by adults providing a catalogue of learning possibilities. Our society has been information-rich for many years now, and we have even more possibilities than before through computer access to a kaleidoscope of web-sites. We have the technology and know-how, we can rebuild the natural curriculum. It is time to move on from the superstition of subjects.
(First published in the Roland Meighan column of Natural Parent, March/April 2000 under the title of 'The natural curriculum'.)
16. Head teachers, leadership and courage
or, what kind of head teachers do you want for your children?
Head teachers have featured in the news recently. One reason is that the government is setting up a college for head teachers and is looking for a suitable candidate to be in charge.
Then, somewhat to my surprise, I found myself addressing three different conferences for head teachers in 1999. In each case I was asked to speak about the next learning system.
Next, a recent conversation I had was about head teachers. A friend observed that he had been to a large meeting in London to hear a head teacher who had made a reputation for turning around so-called failing schools. The head teacher paraded a whole series of aggressive techniques, based on domination, for the approval of the audience. The audience seemed to be impressed. My friend reflected that he seemed to be alone in regarding this head teacher as a licensed institutional bully, with somewhat fascist tendencies and devoid of any democratic ones.
This caused me to reflect on head teachers I admired, and what they had in common. The first head teacher that came to mind was in charge of the school where I began my first year as a teacher. He would, on occasion, take the whole school of 550 secondary schoolchildren for two hours a time, for hymn singing and mental arithmetic, armed only with a pianist and a cane. I expressed some guarded admiration to him for his achievement in crowd control, and confessed that I could not see the day when I could do the same. His reply surprised me. He did not want me to copy him. He said he had learned that his authoritarian methods did not work very well. He appointed young teachers from college, like me, in that hope that they would find better ways to do things. I thought that he showed considerable courage in admitting this to a young teacher on his staff.
Another head teacher that I met in a Copenhagen school a couple of years ago, showed another kind of courage. Whereas Denmark has a ratio of one teacher to 18 children, he had manipulated the resources of his school to achieve two teachers to every 18 children. He explained other adventurous ideas operating in his school, and complained bitterly that at 67, he only had three more years to serve before compulsory retirement. One of the visiting party commented, that even for Denmark, some of his initiatives were very daring. He smiled, and said, "in my experience, it is easier to obtain forgiveness, than it is to obtain permission." I thought that he showed the courage of a true innovator.
A different kind of courage was exhibiting by a heat teacher friend, who having looked into home-based education, decided that this was the appropriate course of action for his two young daughters. He then had to explain to his governing body why he thought parents should have such a choice. In a further bout of courage, he later persuaded governors, staff, parents and children, that the education in the school would be much more effective if the school democratised itself. The story is written up in a book, Participation, Power-sharing and School Improvement, (Trafford, B., 1998, Educational Heretics Press).
Currently, one head teacher is under siege by the government. Zoe Redhead, staying close to the principles of her father, A.S. Neill, continues to run Summerhill school by encouraging both autonomy and democracy within its walls. Courageously, she refuses to submit to the domination-riddled ideas of the inspectors. The school may have to go to the European Court of Human Rights to defend its cause. It will be costly, and I would like to encourage all readers to send a donation, however small, to the Summerhill fighting fund. You do not have to agree with everything goes on at Summerhill - I have one or two reservations myself - to want to support their rights to exist.
I also respect the courage of a secondary head teacher who was put in charge of one of the 'schools of the future' at Telford. He developed it as a campus of small mini- schools working with maximum participation and democracy. Unfortunately, the government of the day had an attack of cold feet regarding the 'schools of the future' initiative. The head teacher resigned in mid-career rather than return the school to the standard authoritarian model. Instead, he joined the Small School at Hartland, then became head of the small parents teacher co-operative school at Ticknall, and then set up the experimental flexi-college in the East Midlands, now sited at Burton-on Trent.
One head teacher, whose courage I admire, I have never met. He is Daniel Greenberg of Sudbury Valley School, U.S.A. The 'daring' behaviour at Summerhill in allowing children the choice of whether to attend lessons or not, seems mild compared with the approach at Sudbury Valley. Here there is no timetable and no curriculum, until the learners set about devising one. What our domination-riddled OFSTED inspectors would make of this, since they cannot even tolerate Summerhill, is not hard to imagine. I imagine that they would demand immediate extinction.
I met a head a few years ago who had to cope with the extinction of his school on a regular basis. Piortre ran a school in Poland, in Gdansk, during the Russian occupation. His idea of a good school required a democratic approach with a learner-driven curriculum. The Russian inspectors required the domination-riddled approach of a national curriculum, formal teaching and incessant testing, the model since copied from the Russians by OFSTED. The inspectors sent Piortre to prison and closed his school. The school relocated itself during his absence. The head came out of prison, found the new location and resumed duties. The police came for him again. This happened so often that he decided to have a small suitcase ready packed by the door, so that when the police came in the middle of the night, he could go to his cell without disturbing the family. I think I must give him my top award for courage, but I doubt if he would be regarded as a suitable candidate to run our government's new head teacher college.
The Russians occupying Poland would have approved of the aggressive, authoritarian head teacher applauded for 'turning around failing schools', mentioned earlier, as a dynamic leader. This does of course, raise the question of what counts as good leadership.
The current fashion of describing leadership in terms of the authoritarian model of an 'action man' or 'action woman' contrasts with the democratic view. This has been expressed in these words: "Of a good leader they say, when the work is done, we did this ourselves." (after the ancient Chinese philosopher, Lao-Tse)
Dame Patricia Collarbone suggests that a flexible, rotational model of leadership is suitable for the modern world: "Max De Pree likened leadership to jazz. For me this captures the essence of leadership and learning communities. Jazz bands are collegial. Their members learn from each other, follow each other, lead each other. They are passionate about what they do. They continually experiment, change the rules, take risks. And when it all works, it thrills and excites the participants and the listeners." (R.S.A. Journal 4/4. 1999.)
Who would I appoint to run a head teachers college, assuming that I thought such a college was a good idea in the first place? Well, I submit those listed above as suitable candidates. They are all capable people of courage, humanity and democratic in inclination.
More practically, those parents who still need to make use of schools have to have some idea of the kinds of heads and teachers they want. Do they stand up to the Robert Owen test, for example, which was, if you recall, "that they should be fit company for children."
published in the Roland Meighan column of Natural Parent, May/June 2000, under the title of 'What kind of head teacher do you want for your children?'
17. Grandparent power?
The phone rang. It was a grandparent. The voice said that the family had been talking about the possibility of home-based education. Children, parents and grandparents alike, were unhappy about the domination-riddled and learner-hostile schooling that they were experiencing. The parents were both out at work. What did I think about the grandparents undertaking to supervise home-based education? I replied that I thought that this was an idea well worth exploring.
There have been a trickle of inquiries from grandparents asking similar questions over the last twelve months. Since this has not happened in the previous 23 years that I have been researching home-based education, I am beginning to wonder if this is could be the 'start of something big', as the song title puts it. Is it the beginnings of grandparent power?
A recent report from Japan about classroom breakdown, contained the following paragraph. "Classroom breakdown is a serious concern not just for the educators but for the business leaders who exercise influence in Japanese society. It was reported that in seminars targeted at business people ordinarily interested in little beyond matters of the economy, lectures on 'classroom collapse' drew noticeably larger crowds than usual. Their anxiety about what is happening to their young grandchildren, rather than their grown-up children, is notable."
In the USA, public opinion on home-based education has shifted. The shift amongst grandparents has been a particular feature. In the book by Brian Ray, Strengths of Their Own, he reports that currently, 67 percent of grandparents supported their families' practice of home-based education. About 22 percent were neutral, and only 11 percent were opposed. There has been a change here that follows the general trend, which is that in 1985, 73 percent of a Gallup poll survey of the general population in USA said home-based education was a bad thing. In 1997 this had fallen to just over 50 percent. The reason suggested was that favourable stories about home-based education were in contrast with continuous nightmare stories about mass compulsory schooling. Interest has increased to the point that the Internet bookseller, Amazon USA, now lists over 200 books on the subject of home-based education, and they are selling steadily.
Demography also suggests the possibility of grandparent power. In UK, in 1901, life expectancy for women was 45 and for men it was 49. In 2001 life expectancy for women is expected to be 80 and 75 for men. By 2020, it is expected that 40 percent of the population will be over 50. All this amounts to a rapidly growing population of grandparents, and indeed, of great grandparents.
I recently saw a notice about a grandparents pack which contained suggestions of ways in which grandparents can use books and stories with their grandchildren. It had been put together by the public library service, spotting the potential of grandparents. It had information about choosing books, helping children learn to write, do craft, do cookery, make puppets, and telling stories. It was useful to grandparents whether their grandchildren were attending school or being home educated.
A recent public opinion poll (MORI), commissioned in UK by the Campaign for Learning, found that 90% of adults, including plenty of grandparents, were favourably inclined towards further learning for themselves. In the right environment, they were willing to undertake further learning. The bad news is that 75% said they had been unhappy and alienated in the school environment, and that, therefore, they preferred to learn at home, in the local library, at their workplace - anywhere other than a school-type setting. Not surprisingly, more and more adults are uneasy at putting children through the same kind of schooling experience, now extended to 16,000 hours - as much as double what some grandparents will have endured.
A recent newspaper article was entitled 'rise of the silver surfer'. It showed how in the USA the over 55 age group has been the fastest-growing sector of American Internet users. The report showed how there was a similar trend to be found in the UK. It is also the case that computers are helping to break down the ageism of our social structure. The idea that the young cannot teach the old anything, is shown to be nonsense when you observe five-year-olds teaching their grandparents how to surf the Internet.
Similarly, the idea that you cannot 'teach an old dog new tricks' is exploded by the 'silver surfers' phenomena. Many of the ageist assumptions about learning have been exploded by the experience of the Open University. The idea that you cannot learn in old age is shown to be dubious when people are graduating in their 70s and 80s.
As further evidence, John Holt wrote a book entitled Never Too Late, describing how he learnt to play the cello in his 50s. He reached performance level with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, thus refuting the idea that if you failed to learn a string instrument early, it became impossible later.
A USA grandparent, a former head teacher, recently wrote to me from California about the experience of his grandson: "… we should start a campaign to 'scrap schools'. There is no hope to change them. I am working now with one small elementary where my grandson attends. It is a lousy school as you and I view learning - but sadly, it is better than most in the area. In trying to work with 20 teachers to find four who might start a non-graded, individualised school-within-a-school, I have yet to find one I would hire - let alone put in a new environment. They have no vision of what it could be - and are so overwhelmed by their daily personal lives, and the oppressive mandates of the district, that they have no chance to 'renew'."
None of the grandparents who have telephoned - often resulting in very long phone calls - have blamed individual teachers. It is the learning system of coercive, compulsory schooling that appalls them. "My grand-daughter never did anything mean, underhand or spiteful until she went to school and began to learn some bad habits," said one. "I have watched my lively, cheerful, bright grandchildren gradually losing their sparkle," said another. They recognise a crucial fact about learning systems, that how you learn is as important, if not more important, than what you learn. Thus if you learn literacy in an oppressive regime, you become literate with the attitudes of oppression included. If you learn to read and write in a regime of co-operation and power-sharing, (such as Summerhill School), you become literate with democratic habits of mind. If you become literate in a flexible, learner-friendly home-based education regime, you become flexible, creative, resourceful and ... literate.
Many of the observations of the grandparents reflect the findings of study I have mentioned before, by Ann Sherman, and reported in her book Rules, Routines and Regimentation. She informally interviewed children in five different Midlands schools after they had had one year of schooling. Children felt that they were on the receiving end of a crushing process that they endured with considerable reluctance. Children were aware of a 'hijacking' process, where their interests, feelings and concerns were disregarded, but they felt powerless to do anything about it, and saw no alternative but to surrender to it. Ironically, this process is described as giving young people their 'entitlement', when, in truth, it can be seen as taking some of their humanity away.
Some grandparents are starting to find their voices and speak out against what they see as 'the deadening of the spirit of their grandchildren', as one put it. They want a celebration of the joy of learning, sometimes recognising that the primary school classrooms their own children experienced had visitors from all over because they were, at least, pointing in a more humane direction. If this protest continues to increase, long live grandparent power!
By Roland Meighan, first published in Natural Parent, July/Aug 2000
18. It's not what you learn, but the way that you learn it...
As a young teacher, I came across this learning league table from National Training Laboratories, Bethel, Main USA. It ranked a number of learning systems on the basis of how much the learners remembered.
| Formal teaching | ||
| Reading | ||
| Audio-visual | ||
| Demonstration | ||
| Discussion Group | ||
| Practice by doing | ||
| Teaching others | ||
| Immediate use of learning |
There is, of course, much more to learning than memorising, e.g. the questions of which system motivates learners best, and which produces deep learning rather than shallow learning.
I simply refused to believe the evidence about retention rates, however, and threw myself into a whole host of strategies to prove the figures wrong. The pre and post-test results I recorded showed again and again that the research was correct.
Yet the learning system still in most common use in schools and universities is formal crowd instruction. Enthusiasts for the crowd-instructor role tend to ignore the evidence about its levels of efficiency. The short-term recall of learners after formal instruction averages 10% with a usual range of 0% to 20%. The long term recall averages 5% with a usual range of 0% to 10 %. This is why so much homework and revision work is needed to shore up the inefficiency of the learning method.
All this information helped set in motion a life-long interest in learning systems and led to me write a textbook, A Sociology of Educating, (third edition 1999). But it might easily have been entitled The Study of Learning Systems.
A first finding is that there exists a considerable variety of learning systems and each one produces different results. Bertrand Russell in On Education (p.28) states the consequence like this: "We must have some concept of the kind of person we wish to produce before we can have any definite opinion as to the education which we consider best."
So, first decide your intentions, then choose an appropriate learning system. Thus, if we accept the view that the world's most pressing need is to produce people who will do no harm, to the environment, to each other or to themselves, and maybe even do a little good, then learning based on co-operation has to replace that based on competition.
I will illustrate something of the variety of learning systems from my own experience, firstly, from teacher training. When I began work in teacher training I was required to use formal, instructional methods. These were the same methods that had been used on me when I trained to be a teacher, and the intention was to introduce two basic roles. The first was that of crowd-control steward, since a great deal of time is spent dealing with large groups of conscripted learners. Conscripted learners, like conscripted slaves, are not likely to be automatically pleased about their enforced activity, especially as they grow older, and therefore need marshalling. The other basic role was that of crowd-instructor.
There was some general dissatisfaction with this crowd instruction model at the time I moved from classrooms to begin teacher training in 1970. This led to some ideas in UK that schools should encourage a bit more participation, and even try more democratic modes of learning. I offered trainee teachers the chance to work in a different learning system, that of a democratic learning co-operative (DLC). They could plan the course, learn and teach it in ways they determined, and review progress as they went along. I would switch my role from 'the sage on the stage' to the 'guide on the side'. For fifteen years, 1972-88, trainee teachers had this choice and each year, rather bravely I thought, opted for the DLC system.
I was joined in this work by Clive Harber, who was recruited by the University of Natal to help develop the new South African democratisation of schools policy, which was started under the Nelson Mandela government.
The contrast between the type of teachers produced under these two methods was dramatic. Some comments from the end-of-course evaluations written by the students using democratic methods are indicative:
"For the first time I became responsible for my own education which stimulated motivation and a desire to learn. Lack of motivation at school and even at university had been the main reason why I had not enjoyed study. I can honestly say that I have actually enjoyed attending seminars for the first time in my academic life..."
"There was intellectual enjoyment. Intellectual exploration became an exciting and satisfying end in its own right, rather than as a means to a boring and worthless end ..."
"The co-operative spent many hours in discussion and formulated opinions and views (often varying) in relation to our timetable of work. All the group members felt without any reservation whatsoever that the co-op was a new working experience which was stimulating, enjoyable and very worthwhile."
I was startled, but delighted, to find a considerable leap in standards when I used this approach in teacher education courses. So were the external examiners and inspectors who, never having encountered this approach, knew nothing of its theory or practice. As well being more successful in the standard tasks of memorising and reproducing institutionally approved material, the students also increased standards in other respects. These included resourcefulness, flexibility, curiosity, skills in co-operative learning, readiness to unlearn, research techniques, enhanced personal confidence, and strong feelings of community and mutual support amongst the members of the learning co-operative.
Another illustration from my own experience is the contrast between school-based learning and home-based learning. The new initiatives in home-based education in UK began in 1977, so I began to research them, since they presented a holistic learning regime of a quite different kind to mass schooling. Until then, home-based education had been an option for rich families, with the most well-known case celebrated in the popular film, The Sound Of Music cataloguing the experiences of the Von Trapp family. But now, home-based education began to be implemented by 'ordinary' families right across the social scale.
I found contrasts. Learners from home-based education usually achieved superior results in academic achievements, emotional intelligence, and social maturity. In addition, there were bonus skills of resourcefulness, flexibility, curiosity, skills in co-operative learning, readiness to unlearn, research techniques, enhanced personal confidence, and strong feelings of community amongst the members of the family. Interestingly, the results of the learning co-operatives and home-based education showed many similarities.
My own interest was stimulated by the experience of taking my student teachers into schools in the morning, and finding the creation of a lively interest in learning rather like toiling uphill, with the wind and rain in my face. We had some successes, but it was hard-going. In the afternoon, however, I could find myself working with a family or group of families with children of the same age as in the morning. But now it felt like striding downhill with the breeze on my back and the sun shining. It suddenly seemed to be easy-going creating a lively interest in learning. Over the years, I teased out the reasons for this contrast and set some of the results down in a book, The Next Learning System: and why home-schoolers are trailblazers.
How do you classify learning systems in a way that will show that the way you learn is a critical issue? None of the attempts I looked at seemed to be getting us very far. Here is the approach I developed which classified systems as Authoritarian, Autonomous and Democratic, along with a fourth category of Interactive:
This classification helps demonstrate a key lesson from the study of learning systems - that HOW you learn is as important, if not more important than WHAT you learn. It's not just what you learn, but also the way that you learn it.
As an example, let us take literacy. It assumed that literacy is automatically a good thing. But, learning literacy in a bully institution makes you a literate bully. Richard J. Prystowsky, in Paths of Learning, Autumn 1999, reminds us that at the Wannsee conference, January 20th 1942, high-ranking Nazis met to plan the 'Final Solution to the Jewish Question', that is, for the destruction of European Jewry. Over half of the conference participants had PhDs - a cohert of highly literate bullies.
When someone proposes that literacy is the aim of the learning system, we need to ask, " what kind of literacy?" Are we to produce literate fascists, or literate totalitarians? Do we want literate democrats, or a literate minority composed of the greedy and super greedy? If we want literate male chauvinists, we need single sex institutions.
The attitudes and habits of mind absorbed along with a learning system have been referred to as the 'hidden curriculum'. More accurately, since they are not all that hidden, it is the 'unwritten curriculum'.
As governments world-wide bang the drum for more education, Don Glines of 'Educational Futures Projects', USA, introduces a sobering thought:
"...the majority of the dilemmas facing society have been perpetrated by the best traditional college graduates: environmental pollution; political ethics; have/have not gap; under-employment - (in fact) the sixty four micro-problems which equal our one micro-problem!"
If some of the highly literate are responsible for many of the major problems that now face the world, perhaps we need less 'education' and more 'wisdom'?
If you want to produce people with democratic habits, discipline and understanding, or self-directing and self-managing people, then you will need to adopt a learning system that will do this. Thus, a current mistake in UK is the citizenship initiative, believing that preaching the virtues of democracy from within an authoritarian learning system will do the trick. It fails to work, and can be counter-productive in producing cynicism. South Africa, in adopting various measures to democratise its schools, has displayed much more wisdom.
The US radical, Nat Needle writes a protest in response to President Clinton's call to US citizens to learn to be super-competitive in what will be the most ruthless century yet:
"... if the 21st century becomes the story of human beings around the world pitted against each other in a struggle for well-being, even survival, this will only be because we failed to imagine something better and insist on it for ourselves and our children.
"I don't care to motivate my children by telling them that they will have to be strong to survive the ruthless competition. I'd rather tell them that the world needs their wisdom, their talents, and their kindness, so much so that the possibilities for a life of service are without limits of any kind. I'd like to share with them the open secret that this is the path to receiving what one needs in a lifetime, and to becoming strong." (AERO-Gramme, No. 25, Fall 1998)
But, you can only learn the habits and attitudes Needle prefers if you establish an appropriate learning system. We are a long way away from having such a system.
By Roland Meighan, first published in Natural Parent, Sept/Oct 2000,
under the title 'What sort of children do we want?'
19. Interview with John Adcock
Roland Meighan's choice for education book of the year 2000 is Teaching Tomorrow: personal tuition as an alternative to school, with its vision of a new teaching profession that serves families and their learning plans, rather than imposing government demands on them.
Here he talks to its author, John Adcock
Roland Meighan: "In your books you see a close, trusting partnership between parent and teacher as the cornerstone of successful childhood education?"
John Adcock: "Yes, but as the child gets older he or she will join that decision-making partnership and contribute increasingly to the plans being drawn up for his or her education. I'm talking here of the early-education stage from birth to 13 or l4 years - and even before that, because most parents welcome advice on coming to terms with the changes that will occur in their lives after their baby is born. My wife and I certainly did! Then, as well as pre-natal support, they will need practical help and a whole range of ideas for encouraging and stimulating the learning processes that begin in their child's earliest days."
RM: "Long before he or she reaches the age of five when school starts?"
JA: "Yes - except that 'school', in the way that word has been under-stood over the past 130 years, becomes an increasingly irrelevant concept as we enter the 21st century. But not only irrelevant: with some children - perhaps many - the school, as now constituted, can become an obstacle to much learning. Economic, social and technological change has been so rapid and all-embracing since 1945 that we can now be thinking radically of an education system for young people in which the traditional school plays no part at all. I think we have reached a critical stage in state-provided education and need, rather urgently, as many novel and thought-provoking ideas as we can get.
RM: "Getting a hearing for major new ideas isn't easy, as we both know well."
JA: "Far from it! For instance, when state schooling for five-year-olds began in the 1870s no practical alternative forms of teaching were available. Now exciting alternatives are here already. The social significance is truly immense - but little media time is given to that. Concern is restricted to ways of keeping the 19th century system on the road! Back in Victorian times, however, many parents and grandparents were semi-illiterate, their homes crowded, their spare time and money non-existent, their teaching resources meagre, and technological help was nearly a century away. A family-based education, as opposed to a school-based one, was a non-starter - except for the rich. Children had to be taken from their homes and taught in schools. And fairly forbidding places most of them were!"
"But the situation of families in Britain today is beyond anything even dreamt of by the average parent of 1870. Today, the possibilities for educating children at home, each according to his need, are infinite. More space, time, money, knowledge and other resources, all combined with limitless, but controlled, support from the multimedia, makes possible an enjoyable, encouraging and personalised study programme, with skilled individual tuition, for every boy and girl."
"No longer do we need classes of 30 pupils, in schools of hundreds, following a politically-contrived, centrally-administered, imposed and externally-inspected national curriculum, based on the targets, tests, performance league tables, and the naming and shaming antics so beloved of the civil servants and politicians in their London-based offices."
RM: "So, it isn't the school as such which you object to, but rather what goes on inside it? What the children and teachers are subjected to and what the parents are persuaded to believe is important?"
JA: "That's the whole point. And that is what must be made clear. After 30 years working in state education, I know how hard most children work, how supportive most parents are, how conscientious most teachers are, and how seriously most school governors take their duties. Much work is done in schools which is good and it would be ridiculous and hurtful to say otherwise. But it is the institution of school - its rigid social structure - with its physical restrictions, large numbers, time-tabling requirements, disciplinary code, hierarchical set-up, standardised curriculum, tests, inspections and stress that is the problem."
"Think how much more a gifted teacher could do if she were wholly trusted and given free rein to spend her time, her energy, her imagination and her other resources. - as well as her compassion - to devise work schemes for her pupils, aided by their parents, working in small study groups at different times and places as agreed. The school as we know it would become superfluous and the vast sums spent on its upkeep could be released for more valuable, personalised educational work."
RM: "But what of the billions. already invested in school land and buildings and in our huge teaching force?"
JA: "Some buildings would continue to be used - but not as schools. After conversion some would become vital community resource centres offering libraries, sports centres, laboratories, recreation areas, study sections, cafes, health advisory services, overnight accommodation, multimedia facilities and much more. They would be open to all local residents. Some strategically-placed schools would become field-centres."
"As regards existing teachers, those who wanted to, and who were prepared to retrain, would become personal, professional family tutors to small groups of children and their parents. They would be there to help all those parents who wanted to plan and then see through the early education of their own children."
RM: "The education of the child would pass to the family?"
JA: "It would pass back to the family. For thousands of years the family, several generations of it, educated its own children. Universal and compulsorily-attended schools changed that during a particular and unlikely-to-be-repeated period of economic development in western society in the late 19th century. That period has passed. Now the family, benefiting from the huge opportunities that period eventually gave rise to, can resume its original work. The school will be seen as a blip in recent social history: no more."
"Given the extraordinary resources readily available, the key to the new approach will be maximum trust. Trust at all times. Trust between child, parent and personal tutor. That trust is imperative in all professional relationships, and it will be in the new profession of tutoring. There will be the recognition that all children and their family circumstances are different: that they are unique, and that it follows that sets of needs are different too, so that the designing of a successful early-education programme for a child will depend on the recognition and acceptance of those differences. Parents are likely to know of these needs in their own children earlier and sense them more deeply than the personal tutor, and parents' input in the construction of each study programme will be essential."
RM: "But some needs might be common to a sizeable majority of children?"
JA: "Yes, such as the learning of sound health practices, of having opportunities for establishing valuable social relationships, for the acquiring of literacy and numeracy, for internalising compassion and an understanding of others. We know that children differ physically, and that their potential for development in many areas is varied, as is their increasing range of interests. The task for personal tutors and parents will be, gradually and patiently, not only to construct and then amend programmes of study, but to carry them through in many different environments. It will be a challenging role, but one that will be greatly rewarding in the work satisfaction gained. The child will be happily involved, the parent directly involved, and the tutor professionally involved."
RM: "But all this is demanding much of the tutor. Can she succeed?"
JA: "There are two points there. It is, no doubt, asking a lot of the tutor, but just think of what we now ask of a general medical practitioner! The tutor will get the same level of training and accept the same level of responsibility as the family doctor - perhaps more. In return, society must give her the same level of resources, respect and reward."
Can she do it? Yes: with help. First through her long, demanding initial professional training, and then, throughout her career, by means of generous study leave. Those teachers who feel they cannot or do not want to undertake this new role should be offered alternative, less taxing, work. But no personal tutor will be working on her own: there will be no classroom whose door will close leaving her with 30 unresponsive pupils. Panels of seven or eight tutors will cover the age range 0 to 13 years and so each will be able to consult with the others and specialise, to some extent, with a chosen age group.
She will be aided by reconstituted university departments of education and by ever more powerful multimedia libraries. Also, her role will be very different from that of the schoolteacher: the bulk of 'lesson' material will be freely available from the multimedia on demand - anywhere at any time. Part of the tutor's skill will lie in knowing what is available, sourcing it, assessing and amending it, and cleverly incorporating it into the programme of study which has been devised for her pupil and accepted by his parents. The parallel with the GP and her patients, group practice, technology and teaching hospital resources, continues to hold good. Indeed, we could be seeing, during this century, a merging or working-together of education and medicine!"
RM: "Then, on top of all that, you advocate in your new book, Teaching Tomorrow, the payment of a salary to some parents?"
JA: "Certainly. To those parents who choose to train for and qualify in the increasingly-demanding and socially important craft of parenthood and who stay at home, full-time, to educate - with the tutor's help - their young children. Yes, and it would be a substantial amount. There is no more important work in our society than caring for the next generation. We need to ensure that every pound or dollar spent is well spent, and we cannot claim that is the case in the system today."
"If this seems revolutionary, remember that taking children from home to school - compulsorily - was just such a revolution in the 1870s. In 2000 we could be into counter-revolution. We need no longer see childhood education devised for employers' and nations' benefits, but for children's benefit - aiming for a more considerate, less competitive, less grasping, less consumer-based future. Childhood education will be in the hands of parents and tutors rather than those of politicians and their bureaucrats. Politicians may not like that, but in my view, that is all to the good: the less they have to do with our children's education the better!
A version of this article appeared in Natural Parent November/December 2000 under the title of: "School's Out"
We have all just witnessed an astonishing event. We have gone into a new century with the same model of education with which we started the old century - the 'tell them and test them' model. It is rather like basing modern transport policy on the coach and horses. What makes it more astonishing is that the Chief Inspector of Schools at the start of the last century, Edmond Holmes, spent thirty years trying to make the model work efficiently, (including its payment by results approach now re-born as 'performance-related pay'). He eventually gave up and described this model as 'the tragedy of education' and declared his sense of shame for being a party to it.
The comment of Sir Christopher Ball in a recent edition of Natural Parent, takes up where Holmes left off: "The nation (and its governments of either persuasion) seems to be intent on reinforcing a failing system at present ... It is no use tinkering with our 19th-century model of education. It needs to be completely re-thought and restructured. Gradual reform is unlikely to succeed. Radical change is needed."
But not everyone is content to wait for governments to catch on and catch up. People at the grassroots, in a variety of countries, have been busy for the last twenty years or more. Two new books bear witness to this activity. The first is called Creating a Cooperative Learning Centre, an idea-book for home schooling families. It is written by Katherine Houk from Chatham, New York who is co-founder of the alternative learning centre, a co-operative which offers classes, workshops, field trips, and other adventures for families involved in home-based education. Her own children began to be educated at home in 1983. She is also involved in art and design, writing, and the ministry, especially interfaith work. Next, she is director of the Alliance for Parental Involvement in Education, (ALLPIE), a non-profit organisation dedicated to providing education information to families.
She tells the story of a centre she co-founded along with a few dedicated parents, now serving over 70 children. In the process, the author provides ideas you can apply to your own situation. "Discover how you can create a gathering place for creative and joyful learning in your community, a place for people of all ages," declares the author.
The sequence of events follows a now familiar pattern. After an often lengthy period of heart-searching, debate and enquiry, a family decides that the best option available to them is to educate at home. Apprehensively, they join the ranks of those reluctant heretics the home-based educating families. Naturally, they have a concern about social life and social skills. So, first, they set out to find clubs and groups in the community to join, ranging from the Guides and Scouts to judo groups, choirs and craft groups.
Then they decide, often at the same time as searching for community groups, to make contact with other families who are educating at home, and see if they can do a few things together. If this is a success, the next stage is that these families may decide to meet on a more regular basis and rent premises for this to happen. In this way a co-operative learning centre is created.
Houk's book gives pages of practical advice to anyone wishing to follow the same path. There are sections on organisation and operation, laws and bylaws, contracts and agreements, finance, dealing with the press, planning the programme, and the strength and challenge of diversity.
In the UK too, groups have been developing the same kind of vision. Human Scale Education has supported the development of small parent run schools, known in the USA as charter schools. The newly-founded Centre for Personalised Education Trust has started work supporting, in particular, learning centres created by groups of home-educating families. A well established one is the Otherwise Club in London. Chris Shute reports, "It meets twice a week in a sort of community hall in north London... The club is a support group for home-schooling families. It does not do their job for them, but it provides a context in which they can meet together, discuss their problems and allow their children to do a little learning in company with other youngsters who are also being educated at home," ( in Education Now News and Review Supplement, Summer 2000)
A newcomer to the scene is the Learning Studio at Bishops Castle in Shropshire, which is part of the Living Village Trust development. Carole Salmon reports that "the learning studio is already functioning on a small scale on the ground floor of a house that the Trust owns next to the site. We are hoping to have a purpose-built building within 18 months. The idea here is a centre for home-educated children to meet, play and learn together." (in Natural Parent Sept/Oct 2000, p.26)
The second book is entitled, Creating Learning Communities: models, resources, and new ways of thinking about teaching and learning. It is edited by Ron Miller of the Foundation for Educational Renewal Inc. USA. It is in all respects a contemporary book. First of all it was written and published on the Internet and may be inspected free at www PathsofLearning.com. The writers met on the Internet on a list-serve, CCL-LLCs@onelist.com. The common interests of the writers were the future of learning and the potential impact on society of co-operative community lifelong learning centres. These are emerging particularly drawn from the rapidly growing home schooling movement. This social phenomena is spontaneously self-organising without leadership, without planning, without design and often without being noticed. All of the educators involved, whether home schoolers, autodidacts, co-operatives or futurists, are playing one role or another in trying to transform the learning system.
In the book, thirty leading innovators and writers tackle the issue of the next learning system to replace the dying mass, coercive schooling model. Contributors include Linda Dobson, Pat Farengo, Katherine Houk, Bill Ellis, Don Glines, Jerry Mintz, Ron Miller, and your columnist, Roland Meighan.
These writers are agreed that our common experience tells us that all is not well with society. Today's schools teach by the mode they use - hierarchy, self-interest, authoritarianism, patriarchy, competition, materialism, and survival of the fittest. Humanity looks set to destroy itself with this value system. And, increasing number of observers, including scientists, philosophers, historians, and artists, are starting to warn us, that if present trends continue, we are headed for an enormous cultural and ecological disaster.
Creating Learning Communities is a remarkable book that includes a number of inspiring case studies. There are also analyses of the age of information technology and its impact. A key section looks at the philosophical roots of the next learning system. Finally there is a directory of information and contacts.
The book sets us a challenge. Emerging is a future in which all people will be able to learn what and when they want, regardless of age - a future where learning can be lifelong, where the old paradigms are set aside. We will be able to intellectually roam and seek out as much knowledge, information, and experience as we wish, where we can both learn and teach according to our curiosity, needs, and knowledge. In most segments of society we are some distance from this future, not least because schooling, based on the 'tell them and test them' ideology has dimmed our imagination. But here and there, in growing numbers, all around the world, people are actually living this future today.
Ron Miller draws distinctions between three general approaches. A transmission approach assumes that the primary purpose of education is to induct young people into the established values, beliefs, and accepted knowledge of the existing society. The transaction approach is more sensitive to be social context of learning. There is more room for individual differences, more respect for diverse understandings, and a concern that only a democratic community encourages dialogue and experimentation. The transformational approach is more radical and proposes that to educate the human being is not merely to make the all him a knowledgeable, productive member of society (transmission), all an active, engaged citizen (transaction), but also to encourage each person to discover a deeper meaning for his or her life.
Miller adds the fourth possibility, self direction. It is found well expressed in the writings of John Holt and AS.Neill. It holds that we are naturally learners, and if social institutions would stop cluttering our paths with various prejudices, agendas, and bad habits, young people would follow a natural curriculum and learn throughout their lives of all that is necessary to experience meaningful and productive lives. Most, if not all, of the structures of schooling - grades, lesson plans, age groupings, teaching strategies, key stages and obsessive testing - are seen as irrelevant and counter-productive.
The writers in this book have little sympathy for the existing learning system of mass, coercive schooling. Some see it as obsolete. Well, perhaps spending time in a museum of education might not be all that harmful, you might argue, but some of the writers see mass schooling as actually counter-productive in producing a series of bad habits, ranging from intellectual, through emotional and psychological and political, to social. Others go further and see mass, coercive schooling as infringing three and sometimes four human rights One of these is conscription to an ageist institution. Such an imposition is justified by the dubious belief that being compelled to spend large amounts of time in the company of people chosen for you and of the same age and immaturity as yourself, will somehow turn you into a mature human being. What is really does is set up the context for the tyranny of the peer group with its pressure on the inmates to conform to whatever fads and fashions grip it at any particular time, whether it be expensive trainers or expensive drugs.
The writers in this book have found common cause through the internet. In their own communities they can often be rather lone voices for a more sane learning system. Now, they are able to avoid the gentle sensorship of the media using the technique of regular omission from consideration through the spiking of letters and articles by newspaper and magazine editors. They can present their ideas direct to a world-wide audience. And curiously, some of the writers now report that they are being asked by those formerly using 'deaf-ear' tactics, to write some pieces for them.
Creating Learning Communities edited by Ron Miller, (ISBN 1-885580-04-5) can be obtained from Educational Heretics Press, 113 Arundel Drive, Bramcote Hills, Nottingham NG9 3FQ at £19-50 p. & p. included)A version of this article appeared in Natural Parent January/February 2001 under the title of: "Parents are doing it for themselves"Creating a Cooperative Learning Centre, an idea-book for home schooling families, by Katherine Houk, (ISBN 0-9636096-3-7) is available from H.E.R.O books, 58 Portland Road, Hove, East Sussex, BN3 5DL at £12-50
Roland Meighan, November 2000
Here is a simple demonstration of the power of the peer group. A class of young people, or a similar gathering who know each other, is asked to inspect a jar of beans, in turn and without discussion. After examining it, they are asked to pass the jar on and to write down on a piece of paper their estimate of the number of beans in the container. The demonstrator collects the pieces of paper as the estimates are made and keeps them in order.
In the next stage, the jar of beans is circulated again, and the class or group is told that it can revise its estimates. This time the estimates are called out in turn, to the class or group. As each estimate is called out the demonstrator logs it on a flipchart or blackboard. It becomes plain that after the first two or three calls, other members of the group start to revise their original estimates so that it is close to the standard or norm that they see emerging. Individuals may make quite big revisions to make sure they are close to the group norm. By the end of the exercise, a clear group norm can be seen on the chart.
The demonstrator can now plot the original estimates on the chart and start a discussion as to why the patterns are not the same. Individuals may explain that when they heard the estimates of other members, they felt the need to revise their own estimate. Some may explain that when two or three seem to agree, they thought that they must be right, and that they lost confidence in their own estimate.
The group norm that emerges maybe far removed from the true number of beans in the jar. And individuals who revised their estimate to be close to the norm, can have been right all along. There may be a few independent individuals who stick to their own personal estimate against the group norm, but these are usually rare. Such individuals can also be more accurate than the group norm. But they can be subjected to mild banter and derision or worse, for sticking to their judgement.
This demonstration is based on some classic experiments on factors affecting group judgement, conducted in the 1930s by Jenness, and written up in the psychological journals of the time. I have used the beans in a jar event many times in the past to start discussions on the influence of the peer group.
All this pressure to abandon your own judgement and conform to the group norm is generated merely over estimating the number of beans in a jar. When more serious matters are at stake, the pressure increases. "... if you don't wear Nike trainers and Adidas top and trousers, you are the laughing-stock of the school. I don't know who starts these trends, but they mean everyone needs a computer, a mobile phone, 'in' clothes ... to be cool." Catriona McPhee, aged 12, in Living Green 32, Summer 2000.
'Once in school, they'll learn to hate each other.' This was the title of a newspaper report by David Hill about a new book entitled Prejudice, by Cedric Cullingford. The report, in Guardian Education, 3/10/00, proposed that in theory, prejudice has no place in the classroom, but in practice, that is precisely where it breeds.
Once the habit of dividing people into 'one of us' or 'not one of us' is established, it continues in other contexts. Recent research carried out at Lancaster University on football supporters found that they failed consistently to come to the aid of an injured supporter from a rival team. Secret cameras filled in actor apparently writhing in pain on the floor. When the actor wore a Manchester United shirt, 80 percent of Manchester fans came to his aid. But when he wore Liverpool shirt, all but a handful walked straight past.
'They used to want a revolution. Now they just want money,' was the title of an article in The Observer November 11th, 2000. It quoted surveys commissioned for The Observer demonstrating that any teenage tendency of the past to rebel against the system, had given way to the current peer group identification with consumerism. "I love labels. If it doesn't have the label, I won't buy it. Labels are everything. It's about looking right, being part of something, of a group," said one. The survey showed that for 14 to 16 year-olds, friends are twice as important as family. Four out of five rate 'having a good time' and music as a 'most important to me'. Designer clothes are more important than the environment and making money rates higher than helping others, the survey showed.
In a previous column, (Natural Parent, November/December 1998) I noted some other examples of negative socialisation:
Report 1: Children now expect bullying to be a regular feature of school life. This was the conclusion of a national survey commissioned by the Family Circle magazine showing that eight out of ten have suffered at least once sustained attack. On average, the first bullying experience can now be expected at the age of eight.
Report 2: A report commissioned by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust showed that weapons are now carried by one in ten school students. Although this is much lower than the USA, the trend is upwards. Indeed, a later study published in the British Medical Journal in April 2000, reported that around a third of 11 to 16 year-old boys and 8 percent of girls in Scotland, had carried weapons ranging from knives to replica pistols and knuckledusters. The study showed that those who were involved in drugs, were more likely to carry weapons.
Report 3: Primary Schools are to be issued drug guidelines by the Head Teachers Association. Solvent-sniffing is now found to be common among children as young as 7. The HTA claimed that schools were choosing to sweep the problem under the carpet by not informing the police in order to protect the reputation of the school. The primary school peer group is now a child's key source of information about drugs. As the youngsters grow older, their peer group will supply information about smoking, alcohol, ecstasy tablets, and expensive teenage fashion. A government survey on drugs published in November confirmed a rising trend in the use of drugs amongst schoolchildren. By sixteen, 39% had tried drugs, 55% cigarettes and 73% alcoholic drinks.
John Holt put the peer group agenda in perspective when he wrote: "To learn to know oneself, and to find a life worth living and work worth doing, is problem and challenge enough, without having to waste time on the fake and unworthy challenges of school - pleasing the teacher, staying out of trouble, fitting in with the gang, being popular, doing what everyone else does." (Teach Your Own p.64 -5)
All this helps explain why one reason for starting to educate children at home is to replace the predominantly negative socialisation of school, with the predominantly positive socialisation of a home-based education programme, operating out-and-about in the community. One home-educating parent commented, "people often say to me, you are so brave. But I reply, no, you other brave one, because you hand your children over to a bunch of strangers, and hope for the best." She might have added, "and you hand your children over to the domination of the peer group, and hope for the best".
Ironically, the domination of the peer group is brought into being by the adults who created an ageist institution called school in the first place, and those who continue, foolishly, to perpetuate its existence. The idea that press-ganging all young people of the same age, and more importantly, similar immaturity, into one place for a total of at least 16,000 hours, year in, year out, will somehow lead to emotional and social maturity, is dubious, if not absurd. It plainly does no such thing. The next learning system has to deconstruct the ageism of the present one and create all-age, community, invitational learning centres. (It is feasible, however, to have some age-grouping within a non-ageist institution for particular purposes and as a temporary phase or expedient - such as early childhood groups.)
We do not have to look far to see how such institutions they can work - the public library is just such an institution, and so is the family. I have often answered the question of what do we do with the current schooling system by suggesting we close it down completely. Then we hand the plant and personnel over to the library service asking it to expand its educational brief beyond books, and multi-media information materials to the organisation of invitational community learning centres with courses, classes and group activities such as orchestras and drama. The public library has many of the features required in the next learning system - it is non-ageist, it is invitational and personalised not coercive and standardised, and it also operates with a catalogue curriculum approach rather than a restrictive imposed curriculum.
What can parents who still have to use the flawed institutions of the schooling system do in the meantime? It is not going to be easy. The social psychological research on the difficulties of changing attitudes once they are established, is not encouraging. On the other hand, after one beans in a jar event, young people were known to label as 'beanies' people who abandoned their own judgements merely to please the group, rather than discussing them. Thus the peer group had moved towards two key ideas in democracy - toleration of a variety of points of view and a need to explore these.
Therefore, constantly presenting the facts, such as the findings of the surveys given above, can be a start. Then there were some ideas in a previous column on damage limitation (Natural Parent, Jan/Dec 2000). At least it makes you feel better by at least doing something.
This article was published in Natural Parent in the March/April 2001 edition under the title of 'How many peers make five?'
Roland Meighan
For the last quarter of a century, the discussion of education and educational policy in the UK has used the language of fear, almost exclusively. Here are some of the pronouncements made by politicians, inspectors and civil servants that I have noted.
This statement was made in response to question asking whether the speaker was conscious of the amount of fear implicit in OFSTED inspections based on the authoritarian ideology of education, the national curriculum, the national testing system, the invention and imposition of the stifling key stages and the school league tables. His response was "fear is a great motivator".
Without doubt, fear can be used in some situations e.g. to make nervous human beings into soldiers ready to kill on command. But its place in creating confident, capable and inquiring learners is, to say the least, dubious. In his famous book, How Children Fail, John Holt demonstrated that fear-based strategies in the classroom was much more likely to have a serious long-term inhibiting effect: "… they drive them into defensive strategies of learning that choke off their intellectual powers and make real learning all but impossible."
This slogan has been used a number of times recently to indicate that people who question the official dogmas or do not conform unhesitatingly to orders from London, will be 'hunted down'. The people in question range from head teachers who make any kind of protest, to classroom teachers who protest about regimentation, to children who react badly to domination, to parents who question the wisdom of the system. More and more letters written on education to national newspapers claim the anonymity of 'name and address supplied' to avoid retribution.
This idea has been hailed as the mark of strong leadership. Some head teachers who have been held up in public meetings as models to be emulated, are those who go into so-called failing schools and impose their will on the teachers and the children. One observer wondered if he was the only one in the audience who thought the model he was being asked to admire, was that of the officially licensed bully. The consequence is that the bully mentality is legitimised and children absorb the message that 'adults get their way by bullying' and may act on it then, or later.
This pronouncement has been made several times to indicate that adults must be in charge and make children learn whatever the adults deem to be necessary learning. The idea that children should have any say in the process, has been put down with the assertion that all this domination and imposition is 'for their own good'. Children gradually get the message: "Your experience, your concern, your hopes, your fears, your desires, your interests, they count for nothing. What counts is what we are interested in, what we care about, and what we have decided you are to learn." (p. 161, The Underachieving School)
Alice Miller described teaching based on domination as 'the poisonous pedagogy': those dominated usually became dominators in turn, for 'every persecutor was once a victim'. (see Alice Miller by Chris Shute, Educational Heretics Press, 1994)
'Tough love' has been used regularly to justify various aggressive and bullying approaches to educational problems. These range from smacking children to using the police force to round up truants.
Those born before 1950 will recognise these five assertions as a popular with the leaders of the Third Reich. 'Tough love' was used as a justification for members of the Hitler Youth reporting any non-conformist tendencies or conversations that were witnessed at home. Parents or siblings would then be questioned and the necessary punishment meted out. Hitler Youth members were not to feel bad about reporting their parents - they would be only guilty of 'tough love'. It was, after all, 'for their parents and siblings own good'. 'Fear, being a great motivator' would cause people to behave in the required fashion, in time. 'There must be no hiding place', because, 'the leaders know best'. It was under the banner of 'tough love' that corporal punishment was re-introduced.
If you think this thinking is peculiar to other cultures, watch this space! A committee considering the merits of re-instating National Military Service in the UK in the mid 1990s came out against the idea, but declared that another idea, that of a compulsory national uniformed youth organisation, had many merits, but that the time was not yet right.
Am I alone in thinking that a learning system based on and justified by coercion, backed by fear, insults the intelligence of teachers, parents and children alike? In what is supposed to be a democracy based on co-operation, the use of consent, choice-respecting and characterised by what Nelson Mandela saw as the absence of domination, why do we tolerate a totalitarian-style domination-riddled system of learning heavily rooted in fear? John Holt saw it as the enemy within: "Meanwhile, education - compulsory schooling, compulsory learning - is a tyranny and a crime against the human mind and spirit. Let all those escape it who can, any way they can." (Instead of Education, p. 226)
Fear, of course, takes many forms. Schools are usually not granted the power of life and death over children. Only fairly recently, schools in the UK were denied the power of physical pain when corporal punishment was disallowed. A successful lawsuit in the European Court of Human Rights gave damages to a family objecting to their children being beaten. Fearing a flood of successful lawsuits, the government hurriedly change the law - one of those occasions when fear seemed to work.
Schools retain the power to cause emotional, mental and psychological pain, however. Because they are places of coercion and not invitation, they can threaten, frighten, humiliate and denigrate at will, practising the arts of regressive education. Even 'progressive education' turned out to be a method of gently manipulating children rather than supporting their growth as autonomous beings. If you do not choose to be there, the result is that "for all the children some of the time, and for some of the children all of the time, the classroom resembles a cage from which there is no escape." (Philip Jackson in Life in Classrooms)
In the previous edition of this column the fear of the peer group was demonstrated as a potent force for conformity. Clinging on to the outdated idea of organising ageist institutions for learning, means we provide an ideal arena in which the peer group can operate its fear-based mechanisms with maximum, and often devastating effect.
Here are a number of alternatives to the use of fear that are available to parents and to those in educational settings:
Many of our public institutions use invitation instead of coercion. Shops invite you to purchase their goods. Public houses invite you to drink and eat. Travel agents provide a choice of holidays. Public libraries invite you to borrow books. Schools could also be places of invitation, although education could still be an expectation and a culturally sanctioned imperative. But politicians, police and others, ironically, 'fear' the consequences - believing that children would not find the facilities on offer appealing - a devastating indictment in itself. According to opinion surveys, their fears are somewhat groundless, for over 95 percent of young people said they would still attend school if it was voluntary but noted that this alone would begin to transform their attitudes to the place.
One of the findings of recent brain research is that the brain chemistry changes under the influence of encouragement. A positive and receptive mind-set is created. But discouragement creates the opposite effect, and a defensive and avoidance mind-set develops.
John Holt suggested that a principle of good education is 'no question, no teaching'. Until somebody has asked a question, nobody should be teaching anything. This hard dictum can be softened somewhat by including teaching by permission. An adults who asks, 'would you like me to try to explain ... ' is respecting the learner's right to say, 'not just now, thank you'.
Dialogue is another non-hierarchical, non-coercive and respect-laden activity that can start in many ways. A simple, 'what do you think about this, Mary?' is often enough to start a dialogue. Open-ended questions are more likely to stimulate dialogue than closed-end ones. There is not much scope in questions like, 'did you get wet walking home in the rain?'
People who are making things, doing things, playing instruments, reading, or holding a discussion are all providing examples that may tempt the curiosity of others. If, in addition, they are prepared to answer questions or invite interested people to join in, dialogue and shared activity can result.
'Do you mind if I make a suggestion?' or 'can I help?' are quite different in quality to 'step aside, I will take over now'. These interventions indicate some of the difference in attitudes between co-operation and domination. Seeking permission to be helpful is respectful of the other person, whereas asserted intervention is not.
John Holt tells the story of a child who declared an interest in penguins. Recognising a 'teaching opportunity', he found a book on the subject and handed it over. Later he noticed that the book had been set aside. 'But I thought you were interested in penguins?' he said. The youngster replied, 'yes, but that book told me more about penguins than I wanted to know just now.' John trusted the child and accepted the verdict.
He could, of course, have opted for domination: 'you will never learnt unless you persevere,' or ' you should not give up with a book just because it is becoming complicated', or, 'bring it here and I will go through it with you'. But he did not. Perhaps he remembered his own observation about young learners: "They are afraid, above all else, of disappointing or displeasing the many anxious adults around them, whose limitless hopes and expectations for them, hang over their heads like a cloud." (How Children Fail, p.151)
None of this should be news to parents. Most parents, as well as those teachers who strive to defeat the logic of the system, use the above strategies some of the time, and some use them most of the time. Parents use them when dealing with very young children when they are learning to walk, talk, and develop competence in their home environment. All the home-based educating families I have worked with use these strategies, almost without deviation. It is also the way we usually deal with our friends and acquaintances. What makes us think that respect, sensitivity and courtesy could ever be optional in the case of children?
This article was published in Natural Parent in the May/June 2001 edition under the title of 'In place of fear'Roland Meighan
(Or, Are we content with an education policy of Domination! Domination! Domination!
Or, Is 'education' entitlement or enslavement?)
Whilst my photocopying was being completed I saw a notice on the wall of the Kall Kwik Print shop. It said: "Customised: we listen, we understand, we find the solution that's right for you".
I thought this would make a splendid slogan for the next learning system to replace the present learning system of compulsory, coercive schooling followed by the dreary steeplechase of university courses. Its slogan appears to be: "Standardised: you listen, we only understand coercion and dominance, you accept the solution we decide." The slogan in the shop, on the other hand, assumes that people deserve a personalised service, not a standardised one.
Most proponents of the approach of imposing their ideas about what young learners should learn and how they should learn it, are content to indulge in the abuse of human rights to do it. The young learners are not seen as people, but something rather pre-human, to be manipulated, scared or bullied. They are akin to asylum-seekers from the land of childhood.
If compulsory state-controlled learning is such a good idea, why are adults exempt? What would be the reaction to a law requiring adults to attend for 15,000 hours required learning in a confined space, over each twelve year period of their lives? A recent Gallup Poll for the Campaign for Learning found that most adults want to learn new things, provided that it is NOT in anything looking or feeling like a school. The memories of school are still open wounds, it would seem.
Sir Christopher Ball in Guardian Education 20th March 2001, wrote, "I suppose there are two reasons why, against all the evidence, we continue to tinker with the reform of formal education, and try to make the unworkable work. The first is that children do not have a vote. The second is that no one has proposed a plausible alternative to schools. If I were tyrant for a day, I would extend suffrage to include everyone over the age of 11 -and encourage 'home schooling'".
The first abuse of human rights implicit in mass coercive schooling is detention without having broken the law. In a democracy, it is an abuse of human rights to do this. Yet children are detained for 15,000 hours of their young lives in a day detention centre called school. Their only offence appears to be that they are young.
As one home-schooler put it, that children do not go to school by choice but by compulsion, is a massive indictment of our democracy. This detention has been described as a long drawn out course in practical slavery, using totalitarian-type institutions. In what is supposed to be and claimed to be a democracy, such an approach shames us all.
The second abuse of human rights is that of an imposed curriculum rather than a catalogue curriculum. It is a basic human right to control what goes into your mind. The outlawing of subliminal advertising is one way in which this right is protected. When this right is abused, we right talk of indoctrination or brain-washing.
Education in a democracy means working with people who have choices. Indoctrination is working on people who have no choices. Any imposed curriculum is 'working on people' and it denies their right to choose and devise their learning plans. Encouragement, support, advice and the provision of accurate information are all legitimate ways of helping in the formation implementation and review of such learning plans.
Imposition is the approach to be expected in a Totalitarian State of either the 'right wing' or 'left wing' variety. Both Hitler and Stalin, therefore, required a national curriculum and all its trimmings. Religious States require an imposed theological curriculum. But a democracy is supposed to be different, tolerating variety, diversity and choices, provided that human rights are respected. All rights require responsibilities in turn, of course - in general, this means whatever behaviour ands action that is needed to ensure that the rights of other people are respected and protected too.
There are other abuses of human rights to be found in 'education'. One is ageism or age-apartheid. The imposing of 15,000 hours of compulsory peer-group attendance on someone is reprehensible. The expectation that spending this time in the company of equally immature persons will somehow lead to maturity is laughable. It actually leads to the tyranny of the peer group where behaviour, tastes in clothes, in drugs, in attitudes to other generations are defined by the immature for the immature. (This was the subject of a previous column here, 'How many peers make five?')
A fourth abuse, in some cases, is sexism - being required to attend single-sex institutions is another infringement of human rights. Several countries in Europe declare such institutions as immoral and illegal, e.g. Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Belgium. I was addressing a Humanist meeting a few months ago when an enraged member of the audience proclaimed that this was rubbish. There were people in the audience from these four nations, however, who joined in to declare that it was, indeed, the case that single sex school were illegal in their countries. As in the case of corporal punishment, we need the civilising influence of other European countries to help bring our rudimentary and somewhat faltering democracy into more maturity.
Those willing to impose their ideas of standards on others will sooner or later talk about 'for their own good'. The fallacies of this argument have been regularly exposed in the work of Alice Miller (in For Your Own Good), Chris Shute (in Compulsory Education Disease) Rosalind Miles (in The Children We Deserve) and in John Holt's writings (in Freedom and Beyond and Escape From Childhood). Ironically, this imposition is sometimes claimed to be the entitlement of children. I propose that the only legitimate entitlement is that children be treated as people with human rights.
The problem with most discussions about education is that the essential coercive and indoctrinational cultures, and the implicit abuse of human rights, of mass schooling are ignored. School, based on the current model of compulsory attendance, is itself a bully institution.
Next it employs a domination-riddled curriculum - the compulsory National Curriculum or in other countries, some other form of adult-prescribed curriculum. This is 'delivered' by the increasingly favoured domination-riddled pedagogy of teacher-dominated formal teaching, which in turn is reinforced by the domination-riddled compulsory testing system.
All this requires a domination-riddled inspectorate. The unwritten, but powerful message of this package, is that 'adults get their way by domination'. Jerry Mintz, a radical writer in USA, notes one of the outcomes:
"American kids like watching violence on TV and in the movies because violence is being done to them, both at school and at home. It builds up a tremendous amount of anger ... The problem is not violence on TV. That's a symptom ... The real problem is the violence of anti-life, unaffectionate, and punitive homes, and disempowering, deadening compulsory schooling, all presented with an uncomprehending smile."
There are at least three types of long-term outcome. Some of the 'successful' pupils grow up to be officially sanctioned bullies in dominant authority positions as assertive politicians, doctors, teachers, civil servants, journalists and the like.
A majority of the 'less successful' learn to accept the mentality of the bullied - the submissive and dependent mind-set of people who need someone to tell them what to think and do. But in their private life e.g. as parents, they are likely to adopt the bully approach. Rev Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood has just written a book, Without Boundaries, outlining a different approach - consent-based, non-coercive parenting.
A third outcome is the production of a group of free-lance bullies who become troublesome and end up in trouble of varying degree of seriousness. Every bully, declared Alice Miller, was once a victim. The disease is caught.
I suggest that we begin to debate how to replace this morbid and obsolete model of mass schooling with an alternative model of a personalised learning system that respects the democratic values of choice and diversity. Such a system will need to take account of current research, such as the findings about multiple intelligences, multiple learning styles, accelerated learning systems, and the insights of the new brain sciences research as well as the trailblazing activities of the home-based educating families.
Here is a practical three point plan for the next Secretary of Education that I offer for consideration.
These developments will need to be monitored and researched and I recommend that suitable people be recruited from the home-based education movement and also the Open University, since these two groups have been operating the most modern and successful forms of learning for twenty-five years or so now.
In the meantime, the best we can do is to strive to treat children as people, even if the school system lets them down.
- becoming 'just miserable rule-followers'
I arrived at Charmouth in Dorset on a sunny Saturday afternoon in May and went down to the beach with Janet to take in the scene. It was the start of a week-long festival and conference for home-based educating families and about 1500 people of all ages would be in attendance. I was due to start the conference with a keynote presentation on 'Natural Learning and the Natural Curriculum' but I was not yet clear how to set the scene. But for now, relaxing on the beach just seemed to be a good idea.
We gazed with interest at the scene in front of us. Two young surfers were developing their skills on their miniature surf-boards on the incoming waves. Just beyond them two young canoeists were in action too. Two younger children were enjoying jumping the waves as they petered out near the edge of the beach, the smaller one sensibly retreating if a slightly larger one came her way.
Three adults went in front of us and paused at a pictorial display on local fossils, enjoyed talking about it for a minute or two and then went on their way. Along the beach a young boy of about eleven years was working with what appeared to be his grandfather in the fossil cliff. Somebody else was reading a book, another reading a newspaper.
Other people of all ages were swimming, paddling and making sandcastles. One young group had not yet got the sand mix right and their sandcastles kept crumbling. But with trial and error they solved the problem. Parents were on hand everywhere generally keeping a watchful eye but not interfering unduly. A rock pipit appeared close to us and we spent a little time observing it and talking about its appearance and behaviour.
Everyone seemed relaxed and happy and nobody was infringing the rights of others to be doing their thing - a miniature display of democracy in action. as diversity and variety were cheerfully celebrated. It was also a demonstration of natural learning and the natural curriculum and it illustrated the sub-title of my talk to open the conference: 'anybody, any age; any time, any place; any pathway, any pace.'
But then we began to speculate what a guardian of 'unnatural learning', an OFSTED inspector perhaps, would have to say about the same scene. Well, as regards the surfboarders, there was no sign of professional input. No trained teacher was present to set appropriate tasks, attainment targets and tests. The same applied to the canoeists who did not seem to be working to a graded plan of skill development.
The young ones were enjoying jumping the waves but was this preparing them for their baseline assessment? The adults were rather casual about the fossil display and no follow-up work or consolidation appeared to be in evidence.
The grandfather and child were from quite different 'key-stages', if key-stages had yet been devised for grandfathers. The book and newspaper readers seemed very casual about their chosen tasks and put down their book or newspaper whenever they felt like it. And was the book on the approved list for study anyway?
A decent teacher would have had a rock pipit workcard for when the bird appeared so that appropriate written work could be undertaken. There was no sign of a literacy hour or a numeracy hour to be seen. It was all rather amateur.
So, out of the conversation with Janet, the beach scene could be seen as an interesting example of natural learning in action. I had my introduction: 'on the beach'.
Almost everyone starts out with hopes and even high hopes of going to school. Children may anticipate entry into a world of interest, stimulation and development. Teachers may anticipate a worthwhile, satisfying and positive occupation. Parents may hope for the continued blossoming of their children. Grandparents may anticipate happy grandchildren growing up positively in the world.
But it all seems to go wrong somewhere. Firstly, teachers end up reporting that "We are just miserable rule-followers…" This is the verdict of a teacher in South Africa, reported by Clive Harber in State of Transition, London: Symposium Books, 2001. But it could be anywhere in the world, given Edward de Bono's verdict that all the schooling systems he has encountered in the world are a disgrace. I have to agree, for all the ones I have encountered are also a disgrace, although some are larger disasters and some are smaller ones. Only a few are trying to be more democratic and are generally less constipated in their approach having a few echoes of natural learning. Not surprisingly, the 'miserable rule-followers' are currently leaving teaching in large numbers, and many who stay explain that they would leave if they could.
Then, children have their hopes dashed too. As early as age six they can already be reporting that they are aware that their minds are being highjacked. They recognise that their concerns, their interests, their agendas, are already being systematically squeezed off the agenda. But they feel powerless to do anything about it and are already, at six years of age, reconciled to having to conform to a script written by remote others. They, too, become 'just miserable rule-followers'. (see research by Ann Sherman in Rules, Routines and Regimentation, Nottingham: Educational Heretics Press, 1996)
Next, many parents may have their desires thwarted. They may begin to report that school is not doing the kind of things they had hoped. They may find they have handed their children over, in good faith, to a bunch of strangers, hoping for the best, but getting something undesirable - a deadening of the spirit.. Some can take action and educate at home as a better option, others are forced by circumstances to become 'miserable rule-followers'. Some can try damage-limitation. Some persevere hoping to find treasure in the wreck.
This is, in the words of the song title, the 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams'. High hopes gradually - and sometimes very suddenly - becoming shattered. Schooling may then become what has been sometimes been described as a long-sentence of suffering, endurance and general low-level misery. Some learn to put up with it, and even exploit it, better than others.
We should congratulate those teachers, and sometimes whole schools, who manage, despite the odds, to keep some kind of oasis going in the general desert. But it is the long landscapes of desert that I am writing about.
One of the propositions of my new book, Natural Learning and the Natural Curriculum, is that this fate of becoming 'just miserable rule follower' is one consequence of abandoning natural learning and the natural curriculum. In its place has been imposed false and shallow learning and the false, largely junk curriculum of the state - unnatural learning and the unnatural curriculum. Paul Goodman described this as Compulsory Mis-education in his book. Chris Shute calls it Compulsory Schooling Disease in his. The Chief Inspector of Schools Edmond Holmes, writing at the start of the 20th century, called it The Tragedy of Education.
We can stop all this. It has been pointed out many times that mass coercive schooling is NOT a fact of nature. Humans invented it about 150 years ago, and if it is no good, or has outlived any useful purpose, WE CAN SCRAP IT and devise learning arrangements and places that are convivial and far removed from places for miserable rule followers. Adapting the catch phrase of a popular TV series, 'we have the technology and know-how - we can redesign it'.
But we shall need a serious radical re-think to do this. Tinkering with an obsolete and counter-productive system will not do it. Returning to the principles of natural learning looks like a big step on the way forward. In my July column, I proposed closing down schools and handing them over to the Public Library service to redevelop and redesign. Public Libraries have always respected the principles of natural learning and remain popular with the public as a consequence. I am indebted to John Taylor Gatto, the US writer, for many of the ideas that follow.
First of all, libraries tend to be comfortable and quiet, places. It is non-ageist, for people of all ages work side by side in a library; it is not like a school with packs of age-segregated young people. For some reason libraries do not presume to segregate readers by dubious tests of ability or even suspect tests of reading ages.
Librarians do not tell people what to read, do not impose any sequence of reading to be followed, and do not seek to grade my reading. The message of the public library appears to be that you can be trusted to manage your own learning. The librarian lets people ask their own questions and will try to help when help is needed, not when somebody else decides that it is time to intervene.
If I read all day long, that's OK with the librarian. I am not told to stop reading at regular intervals by ringing a bell in my ear. The library keeps its nose out of my home. It does not send letters home or set homework, or issue orders about how I should use my time at home.
There are no records at all detailing a reader's past victories or defeats. If the books I want are available, I get them - even if that deprives a reader more gifted and talented than I am of the book , the library doesn't play favourites for any reason. It is very class blind. It is very talent blind and non-meritocratic. And that seems proper in a country that calls itself a democracy. The library never humiliates me by posting ranked lists of good readers for all to see. It presumes good reading is its own reward.
One of the strangest differences between library and school is that you almost never see a kid behaving badly in a real library, although bad kids have exactly the same access to libraries as good kids do. John Taylor Gatto observed, "I have taken literally thousands of bad kids into real libraries and not once in 29 years did I have a complaint".
The library never makes predictions about my future based on past reading habits. Nor does it imply that my days will be carefree if I read Shakespeare and troubled if I read Barbara Cartland.
Finally the library has real books, not school books. Its books are not written by collective pens, nor selected by screening committees. Its real books conform only to the private curriculum of each author, and not to the invisible curriculum of a government bureaucracy. Real books are a vehicle to transport us into an inner realm of absolute solitude where nobody else can come. Real books generate unmonitored ... mental growth. School books are instruments of control made of paper. They are vehicles of training; they reinforce the school routines of close order drill, public thinking, endless surveillance, endless ranking, and endless intimidation. Real books educate. Schools book school. When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling. You cannot have it both ways.
First published in Natural Parentin the September/October 2001 edition under the title of 'The Boulevard of Broken Dreams'.Roland Meighan
Roland Meighan interviews Rev Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood, a vicar in Birmingham, a home-based educator and author of three books, one on home-based education, another on parenting and a third on the myth of 'free' education.
You are one of the first cohort of female vicars - what is the story here and how is this working out?
Yes, I was ordained at the very first ordination of women in the Church of England in March 1994 in Bristol Cathedral. Before that I had been active in the campaign for women's ordination for about thirteen years, so it was a very important moment for me. My first church job was as a curate in Rotherhithe, London, where our third child was born. I had the first two at theological college and while I was there I completed a PhD in feminist theology.
In the weeks leading up to ordination there was a lot of media interest and a lot focused on me because I was pregnant with our fourth child at the time. In two weeks we gave over seventy interviews to every conceivable form of media from all over the globe. My first Communion service was on Mothering Sunday, which seemed very appropriate.
Since then I have moved to Birmingham and have been in this parish for six years. It is an outer estate with a lot of social deprivation and my main work has been a big fund raising campaign to refurbish our hall, which is one of the very few community spaces locally, and to employ a worker to establish community groups with parents, children and youth. We have raised almost £400,000 and set up a charity to run the hall.
In terms of doing the day-to-day job of being a parish priest, it is probably colleagues, or at least a minority of colleagues, who have more difficulty with my role than people attending church, whether regularly or for baptisms, weddings and funerals. Those on the receiving end of services are more concerned that the ministry is personal, inclusive and speaks to their individual stories than they are about my gender.
Your first book, 'Doing It Their Way', draws on your experience of being a home-educator. How did you become a home-educator?
We started out thinking it was the best educational opportunity we could offer our children and used to share childcare and educating with another family who lived close to us in London. When we moved to Swindon our oldest child was five and half and our next child four. We felt that we needed more than one income, but didn't have the flexible child care arrangements we'd enjoyed in London so home educating seemed less possible and the children were happy to try school. It was a disaster from the start with very severe bullying soon dominating all of our lives. I'm very critical of the school system and of the role institutions can have in people's lives, but the most important thing for us to realize was that whilst we weren't the ones inflicting and ignoring the bullying and misery on our children, we were the ones with the power to stop it. All we had to do was simply deregister our children to open up a whole new world of possibility.
At the beginning of our home educating days we made the very fundamental mistake of thinking that education was some discrete package that could be delivered to children, and thinking that home and school were just alternative delivery systems. We thought we knew exactly what our children should be learning and just had to cram it all in. We were wrong. Our theories have changed a lot since then. We no longer make hard lines between education and life and our educational provision follows the children's intrinsic motivation and autonomy. When we first began I could never have imagined such an educational style, but it has been an incredibly liberating learning experience, not just for the children, but also for Mike and I as parents too.
What was your message in the book?
I think the key concepts are 'autonomy' and 'intrinsic motivation '. In a sense we are constantly becoming home educators. We never arrive, but are always adapting and changing, making new knowledge. We use any resource that seems appropriate at the time - cinemas, TV, computers, books - stories and text books and formal courses, art supplies, museums, historic buildings, parks. We've learnt that it isn't the medium that matters so much as the motivation. If the motivation is intrinsic, then it works.
In the book I try to set out a framework for autonomous education and show that it has the support of a whole strand of educational philosophy and thinking behind it. I also look at some of the questions that people who are supporting their children's autonomy might face; questions about socialisation, about how the basics are learnt and what is meant by the whole notion of 'basics' anyway.
The aim is to give parents the confidence to be able to support their children as autonomous learners in their own right. It takes a lot of swimming against the stream of mainstream educational thinking with all its control techniques and standardised national curriculum, and I think it helps parents to know that they are not just following a whim, but can support their ideas about trusting children with alternative educational beliefs and theories and also that there are other people out there practicing the same kind of education.
The message of 'Doing It Their Way' is that learning and living are indistinguishable and that children know what they need to learn and can flourish by their own lights if their parents actively assist them.
Your second book, 'Without Boundaries', develops a radical philosophy of parenting. Tell us about the 'taking children seriously' approach.
The style of education that evolved in our family obviously had a lot of spin offs for our whole lifestyle. It became more and more clear that once we had let education out of its narrow box, every area of life was going to be effected, so it was wonderful when we came across the 'Taking Children Seriously' philosophy.
Taking Children Seriously (TCS) is an educational and parenting philosophy founded by Sarah Lawrence that proposes that we can live consensually with our children. In essence, the theory is that we can and should eradicate coercion from parent-child relationships and instead seek common preferences, that is, solutions to the problems of daily living together which everyone genuinely prefers and in which everyone wins.
TCS is a whole lifestyle and we are constantly learning and growing along with it, but it is also very clearly an educational theory, suggesting that coercion sabotages our ability to think rationally and creatively and solve problems optimally. It is the most liberating and life changing theory I have ever come across and it is also a really practical way to live. 'Without Boundaries' is an attempt to set out the basic theories of TCS and answer some of the pressing questions that parents face when they try to live without coercion, really respecting and supporting their children's autonomy in all spheres of their life.
TCS is not a recipe for parental self-sacrifice, but for everyone in the family getting what they want - children and parents. It takes a lot of engagement and creativity, but it's my belief that all important relationships take work and are worth the work. I've also found that an awful lot of energy that used to go into conflict and compromise now gets used much more positively.
How does it differ from 'laissez-faire' or 'anything goes'?
Laissez-faire parenting is actually very coercive in that it relies on neglect and parental negation of responsibility. TCS is not like that. TCS parents are very involved in their children's lives and TCS does not condone neglect, however dressed up in liberal philosophy.
The model of the TCS parent is someone who acts as a trusted adviser. Children can afford to listen, knowing that advice is simply the parent's best theories and that the parent doesn't consider him or herself infallible and isn't going to impose a solution. Abandoning children to their own devices without the constant input of information, moral beliefs and the gift of criticism is a failure of parental duty.
Not making the final decision about what another human being puts into his body is not the same as not offering our theories about nutrition, offering to do internet searches with the child on diet, and taking the child to lots of different eating establishments so that he can have fun experimenting with taste.
Giving our children privacy is not the same as ignoring them for several years and telling them to go away whenever they intrude on our space. Helping our children to learn about food preparation, because this is one of their areas of interest, is not an excuse never to cook for them, and so on.
TCS parents are very engaged parents. They don't simply 'leave their offspring to it'; rather they aim to ensure that their children have what they need to make well-informed decisions about their own lives. Of course, whatever path we choose in life comes with a certain amount of risks, but I feel that laissez-faire parenting is particularly risky because children have so little input and information on which to make decisions.
Believing that our children are autonomous human beings in their own right doesn't absolve us from caring deeply and I think parents have a very important obligation to be there for their children and help them find and meet their preferences.
Your third book, 'Bound to be Free', is to be published shortly - what is your theme?
This book it slightly different in that it's a critical appraisal of how education, when institutionalised, can have very negative costs in people's lives, whereas, I argue, that home-education not only avoids those costs, but offers substantial benefits which are simply not available in institutional settings. In 'Bound to be Free' I explore the myth that compulsory, state-provided education is 'free' education and look at the impact this provision has on our freedom and autonomy, as children, parents or society.
In this book I am particularly trying to address two questions: 'If schooling is provided by the state, whose interests does it serve?' And, 'Is 'free' schooling really free, or does the apparent freedom mask a range of hidden costs over which consumers of education have very little control?' I also go on to look at some of those hidden costs in detail.
There is a lot of misery being inflicted on children in order to get them to conform to certain educational agendas. There is an enormous rise in medical, psychological and civil liberty intervention into children's lives and families under the guise of education. Conformity has a high price tag and the emotional costs of bullying and labelling which often accompany school experiences may prove too expensive to both individuality and free society. I am also concerned with how parents and children are deskilled in favour of 'experts'. I want to argue that the cult of expert teachers should be replaced by a culture of mentors and resources.
For autonomy and true freedom in education to flourish, I think we need to look to the Do-It-Yourself positive alternative of home education, whether undertaken by individual families or by voluntary communities. In the book I l look at how home education retains philosophical control and personal accountability in the family; retains choice over the content of education; builds an educational culture which respects civil liberties; promotes divergence, individuality and emotional health; and focuses the skills base in families.
My newspaper tells me that Cherie Booth Q.C., wife of prime minister Blair, has taken an interest in the issue of bullying, saying that bullying permeates British culture and all aspects of daily life.
Nelson Mandela's choice for Education Minister, Professor Sme Bengu proposed that democracy means 'the absence of domination'. Since most schools in South Africa had domination running through them as if they were a stick of rock, he set about devising a policy for democratising schools.
Visitors from societies that have been totalitarian see the same domination-riddled pattern in the British school system. When I asked Professor Eugenia Potulicka from Poland what she would say in her report about UK schools and our education system, she said. "Oh, I shall tell them it is totalitarian." She went on to say: "The 1988 Education Act is a very dangerous development for it has politicised schooling in the direction of fascist thinking. It is the worst development in Europe at the moment."
These three people alert us to some worrying features that begin to influence children from an early age. One mother reported that her daughter never did a mean-spirited or unkind action until she had been in school a few weeks. I have mentioned previously Ann Sherman's research which showed that children by the age of six are aware that they are being schooled into regimental, rule-bound attitudes.
Many readers will be familiar with the proposition that 'power corrupts': those who gain power too often use it to control and manipulate for their own ends. They may be less familiar with the idea that 'powerlessness corrupts too', by creating a fatalistic and alienated mentality in the general population. Democracy can be seen as an attempt to deal with both problems, firstly, by having laws based on human rights to control those elected or appointed to positions of power, and secondly by trying to share power amongst the people.
A notable feature of democracy is the principle that those who are affected by a decision have the right to take part in the decision-making. This is expressed in slogans such as 'No taxation without representation!' If we apply this to education, we get, 'No learning and therefore no curriculum without the learners having a say in the decision-making'. In the traditional approach to schooling, however, there is a chronic fear of trusting students and sharing power with them, and a general fear of opting for the discipline of democracy. So, if they are not experiencing and learning democracy, what takes its place?
If you do not have some form of democracy, you are bound to have something worse. This could be any of the standard tyrannies of dictatorship. There is a wide choice of forms of domination: totalitarianism, fascism, theocracy, monarchy, bureaucracy, male chauvinism, or global capitalism.
An approach that indicates levels of democracy in operation in a school is that of Lynn Davies in Beyond Authoritarian School Management where she develops a series of performance indicators of democracy in education covering such areas as the structure of school management, decision making arenas, practice opportunities in democracy, and preparation for active citizenship. Most schools in UK get low scores, and often nil, on these performance indicators. This supports the argument of Carl Rogers when he pointed out that schools, for the most part, despise and scorn democracy: "Students do not participate in choosing the goals, the curriculum, or the manner of working. These things are chosen for the students. Students have no part in the choice of teaching personnel, nor any voice in educational policy. Likewise the teachers often have no choice in choosing their administrative officers..."
On this last point, in a recent article in his 'Thinking the Unthinkable' column in NASUWT Career Teacher, John Adcock asked why we appoint head teachers rather than have a local school body representing the learners, parents and teachers to elect them?
Carl Rogers went on to say: "All this is in striking contrast to all the teaching about the virtues of democracy, the importance of the 'free world,' and the like. The political practices of the school stand in the most striking contrast to what is taught. While being taught that freedom and responsibility are the glorious features of our democracy, students are experiencing powerlessness, and as having almost no opportunity to exercise choice or carry responsibility."
Ironically, in many countries including our own, that sustain the illusion that they are very democratic, democratic educational practices are rare and indeed meet with sustained, hostile and irrational opposition. Instead, it is now the case the conscripted learners are to be taught 'democratic citizenship' - that is having democracy preached at them rather than actually doing it. As one colleague, Derry Hannam, remarked, "Learning about democracy and citizenship in school is a bit like reading holiday brochures in prison."
Democratic practice, in society or in education, is rarely proposed as an ideal state but, paraphrasing an observation of Winston Churchill, the worst system of organisation and order available - except for all the alternatives. Thus the shortcomings of democratic practice, such as the consumption of considerable time in debate, dialogue and decision making, the 'camel is a horse designed by a committee' jibe, are all admitted at the outset whilst maintaining that democratic practice is still the least of several evils.
The point that democracy is a preferable state rather than an ideal, is made in a passage in E.M.Forster's famous essay 'What I Believe', written in 1939, (in Two Cheers for Democracy, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1962):
"Democracy is not a beloved republic really, and never will be. But it is less hateful than other contemporary forms of government, and to that extent deserves our support. It does start from the assumption that the individual is important, and that all types are needed to make a civilisation...
Democracy has another merit. It allows criticism... That is why I believe in the press, despite all its lies and vulgarity, and why I believe in Parliament... Whether Parliament is either a representative body or an efficient one is questionable, but I value it because it criticises and talks, and because its chatter gets widely reported.
So two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three."
It is possible to extract from the above quotations and ideas, some propositions about a democratic education. It will attempt to:
There are two more important aspects. One is the difference between moral and immoral democracy, the other is the difference between shallow and deep democracy.
Aristotle noted that there could be the rule of the untutored mob voting for any fashion or whim that took its fancy - this is immoral democracy. Moral democracy, on the other hand, is underpinned by the value system of human rights. This is important in answering those who have maintained that democracy is dangerous because it allows the operation of any values any majority cares to adopt, however barbaric. Democracy, as interpreted here, follows the classic analysis of Tom Paine and others in assuming the base values of equal human rights as articulated in the Thirty Articles and similar declarations. It does not occupy a values vacuum.
The distinction between shallow and deep democracy is important in education. Shallow democracy only allows limited power-sharing and restricted participation in decision-making. Shallow forms of democracy only allow a small amount of power to be shared, often under limited license, which those in power can withdraw at will, and often confine to only marginal activities. As an example, some schools organise schools councils. They are usually allowed limited time and limited scope, and if they try to extend their range of tasks, they are reprimanded or shut down. Teachers retain a veto and use it whenever it suits them.
Such shallow democracy can degenerate to such a sham as to be counter-productive in leading to cynicism, fatalism, and a belief that 'democracy does not work'. Sham democracy certainly does not work.
Deep democracy allows more and more power-sharing, and in the end, the setting of the agenda itself. Deep democracy is not simply about the number and range of items where power is shared. It is also about the levels of decision-making. It is not just being involved in more items on a longer agenda, but also having the opportunity to decide the agenda itself. Thus in education, learners may be allowed to make choices from a catalogue curriculum - this is shallow democracy. When they move on to construct the curriculum itself, or devise the catalogue, they are engaging in deeper democracy. Thus A.S.Neill's school Summerhill, UK operates democratically in its organisational culture but the formal curriculum is teacher-directed. In contrast, Daniel Greenbergh's Sudbury Valley School, USA, both aspects are democratic - indeed there is no timetable of organised studies until the learners set to and devise one, which they invariably do.
In systems based on dominance, one person, or a group of people makes and implements the decisions about what to learn, when to learn, how to learn, how to assess learning, and the nature of the learning environment. These decisions are taken in course planning committees and accreditation boards often before the learners are recruited as individuals or meet as a group.
This kind of thinking leads inevitably to an imposed National Curriculum and other compulsory features. It is the general approach favoured by totalitarian systems whether right-wing fascist or left-wing communist. The spirit of this approach can be summed up in the slogan: You will do it our way! (Or suffer the consequences)
But the present non-democratic approach to schooling has been described by John Holt as regimental: "School is the Army for kids. Adults make them go there, and when they get there, adults tell them what to do, bribe and threaten them into doing it, and punish them when they don't."
One growing reaction to this domination-riddled approach has been the rapid growth of home-based education, especially in USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and UK. Democratic practice and its five consequences are more likely to be encountered in home-based education than in the mass, coercive schooling system, because power is usually shared with the learners who have more and more say in the decision-making. Consequently, they usually develop confidence in managing their own learning in co-operation with members of the family and others. The USA researcher, Brian Ray, concluded that home-based education tended to produce much better citizens.
School, based on the current anti-democratic model of compulsion and domination is a bully institution. Next it employs a bully curriculum - the compulsory National Curriculum. This is enforced by the increasingly favoured bully pedagogy of teacher-directed formal teaching. Currently this is reinforced by the bully compulsory assessment system. This system is enforced by a bully inspectorate. The unwritten, but powerful message of this nasty package, is that: 'adults get their way by bullying'.
Then, the peer group usually copies the school domination model and so the tyranny of the peer group is born. The media, TV in particular, has an endless stream of bully role-models for us to applaud and imitate. Cherie Booth is right - bullying penetrates all aspects of daily life.
There are at least three types of outcome. The 'successful' pupils grow up to be officially sanctioned bullies in dominant authority positions as assertive politicians, doctors, teachers, civil servants, journalists and the like. A majority of the 'less successful' learn to accept the mentality of the bullied - the submissive and dependent mind-set of people who need someone to tell them what to think and do. A third outcome is the production of a group of free-lance bullies who become troublesome and end up in trouble of varying degree of seriousness.
In contrast, in democratic education the learners work as a co-operative group for they have the power to make some, most, or even all of these decisions since power is shared and not appropriated in advance by a minority of one or more. Many home-educating families work this way, though not all.
Some of the consequences of democratic practices that have been found in the research are:
(a) that there is likely to develop a sense of community amongst a group of learners;
(b) there develops a working partnership between appointed teachers and learners;
(c) appointed teachers develop trust in the capability and creative ability of their fellow humans who come to them in the role of students;
(d) dialogue becomes an essential activity rather than an optional feature, and unmandated or imposed learning is not seen as legitimate.
(e), there are bonus skills such as increased personal confidence, higher self-esteem, and enhanced discussion and research skills.
(f) Standards of formal work usually rise in the long run.
But in the absence of such an approach, Dick and Jane, from an early age, are not learning the discipline of democracy, but something else...
First published in Natural Parent in the January/February 2002 under the title of 'Why Dick and Jane are learning to be bullies'.
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